financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations
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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE! - 1 views
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provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones
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It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen
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Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat)
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working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars
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The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger
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The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political
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And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them
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Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at
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they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets
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It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.)
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plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school
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Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist
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I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?
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(Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.)
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should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely
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This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?
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Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work
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in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it
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There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?
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Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should b
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You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people
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It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems)
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It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
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If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job
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The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the – universally reviled – unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) – and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value
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shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Sep 11
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Permaculture Principles | Design Principles - 1 views
permacultureprinciples.com/principles_business.php
permaculture principles design business resilience paper
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Sep 11
- Cached
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how the principles of permaculture might apply to business.
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The shift will be from merely prioritising output to thinking more widely.
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how to build resilience for business
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observation
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A post-peak world will depend on detailed observation and good design rather than energy-intensive solutions.
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not rely on weather forecasts but to learn to read the clouds,
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“instead of researching the market, be the market”
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businesses should be out there observing.
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larger businesses tend to rely more on surveys and on second-hand information.
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direct contact with customers.
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move our idea of ‘capital’ from what we have in the bank, to the resources we have around us
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not running a business on a constant high speed cash throughput with little or no capital reserves
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lack of resilience in the just-in-time supply approach
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a shift to storages of parts and materials, as well as the need to financially not be so dependent on debt financing
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work slower with more financial reserves and take less risks, not building beyond what the company’s financial resources can support.
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either to not borrow any money at all, or to borrow so much money that you can’t fail, being bigger than the people you borrow money from, so they have a vested interest in your succeeding!
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energy efficient
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long term
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Looking to make buildings as autonomous as possible in a world entering energy descent is critical
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see things that are flowing past and through the business that others don’t see as being a resource and having no monetary value as being valuable.
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any intervention we make in a system, any changes we make or elements we introduce ought to be productive
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This is instinctive to businesses
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Obtain a Yield, in this context, is out of balance
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much of business
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have taken this to extremes
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A well-designed system using permaculture principles should be able to self-regulate, and require the minimum of intervention and maintenance, like a woodland ecosystem, which requires no weeding, fertiliser or pest control.
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moving from “we’re just obeying the law” to being proactive, acting before you get hit over the head with regulation and other vulnerabilities.
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be able to put a foot on the break, not just going hell for leather on profit maximisation.
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apply applied restraint, avoiding excessive, overfast growth that hasn’t been consolidated
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looking for the negative feedbacks, from customers and from the environment in general
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We need to increase the tightness of feedbacks.
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Where nature can perform particular functions
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we should utilise these attributes, rather than thinking we can replace them
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Where nature can take some work off our hands we should let it.
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a shift towards renewable resources
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The emerging opportunities for businesses are things that are renewable. Renewable energy sources are the ones that will ensure a business’s stability in the long run. We can also broaden the concept of renewable resources to include things like goodwill and trust, things which a business can rebuild with good husbandry. Most business doesn’t just depend on law and competition, trust is at the heart of much business and it is very much a renewable resource.
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The concept of waste is essentially a reflection of poor design. Every output from one system could become the input to another system. We need to think cyclically rather than in linear systems.
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looking at our work from a range of perspectives
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wider context
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keep a clearer sense of the wider canvas on which we are painting, and the forces that affect what we are doing.
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being strategic is important too
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ask how is what we are doing part of a bigger picture, the move away from globalisation and towards the local, taking steps back from the everyday.
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This can be done firstly by allowing space for Devil’s advocates, for black sheep, for hearing the voices of those outside of the dominant culture of the organisation and secondly by looking from a holistic perspective of how things interconnect, rather than just relying on experts who are embedded in detail. It emphasises the need to value the generalist, to give value to holistic thinkers.
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allowing people to imagine different possibilities.
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scenario planning
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Permaculture has been described as the science of maximising beneficial relationships.
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Solutions are to be found in integrated holistic solutions rather than increased specialisation and compartmentalisation
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The challenge here is to move to seeing business as being part of the geographical community, as being rooted in place, rather than just part of a globalised community. At the moment for many larger businesses, the local is something one pays lip-service to as a source of good PR, something one is passing through, rather than actually being an integral part of the community.
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This is a profound structural challenge for large organisations. Part of the resilience of the organisation comes from the degree of lateral integration. Resilience is in all solutions, it is the characteristic of ecological systems. If we apply these principles, resilience is one of the emergent properties
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the notion that big is best needs to be challenged
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new opportunities are very hard to understand and exploit from a macro level perspective, and are much better done from small scale perspective. It is here that the idea of appropriateness of scale becomes key.
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more diverse systems have much more inbuilt resilience
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have a diversity of small businesses, local currencies, food sources, energy sources and so on than if they are just dependent on centralised systems, globalisation’s version of monoculture.
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not having all your eggs in one basket.
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In the short term this kind of diversification could reduce profits, but in the longer term it will be more secure
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this is about the reverse of specialisation, about having a mixed portfolio, and presents a big culture change for businesses.
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it is a good strategy for business to keep a diverse portfolio of what sustains the business, keep some things that appear to be peripheral. They may not at this stage appear to be a serious part of how the business is run, but in this new world they will increasingly become so
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‘edge’
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the point where two ecosystems meet is often more productive than either of those systems on their own.
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overlap systems where possible so as to maximise their potential.
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recognising that innovation doesn’t come from the centre but from fringe thinkers.
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giving status to the marginal
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It is important that the business has as many fingers in as many pies as possible, as many interfaces, and recognises that every person working for the business represents it in the community.
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Natural systems are constantly in flux, evolving and growing.
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Remaining observant of the changes around you, and not fixing onto the idea that anything around you is fixed or permanent will help too.
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be flexible, lean and adaptable
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A healthy approach is to start with no complete plan, to allow the process to be emergent. This is not a time when we can work to a rigid plan as conditions will change so fast. Organisations will need to stay on their toes, without rigid management.
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The Revolution at hand - Op-Ed - Domus - 0 views
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Currently, our education prepares us to perform a job — at times any job — that pays us in terms of what we can possess and consume or, in other words, the goods that design and mass production consider to be to our satisfaction — at least partially.
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We have produced artificial needs for years under this mantra
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creating almost nonexistent necessities that are readily available and easy to narrate rather than investigating the problems and real needs of people and communities
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the need for large-scale production is disappearing due to the crystalline democratization of the means of production
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Mediocrity is obsolete
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Money has become absurdly limited
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unable to model the exchanges that serve to give way to a new mode of radically inclusive and more equitable cooperative production
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design becomes a political tool
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Innovation and meaning have been restricted, trapped and suffocated by mechanisms of protection, monopolies, patents and copyrights.
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If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers. Customers barely exist in the creative world now.
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Production will occur only when there is a demand — and not a moment before
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We need a new cultural infrastructure
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A new distributed network of places of cultural and tangible production must be affirmed. The network will stem from fablabs, makerspaces and hackerspaces — the new factories — around the world, or from ambitious projects like the Italian Bottega 21: initiatives that unite the existing cultural heritage of places and traditions with currently available technologies
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design itself must be independent from specific materials
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We will teach students to investigate, discover and create work, products and services that the community needs, rather than merely follow any old curriculum while waiting for a "phantom" labour market to claim them
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"The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not 'how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology', but 'how can we organize a society around something other than employment?'
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James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views
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reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
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General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
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a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
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s. Euclidean space
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metric space
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topological space
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Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
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My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
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Physical or geographical space
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Euclidean space
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distance
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moving
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maximum speed
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objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
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friction
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The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
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information can flow worldwide almost instantly
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Physical space is a common space
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Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
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They can give the location of objects in it
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Conceptual or abstracted spaces
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Peck order
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Social class space
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Social distance
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Political distance
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life space
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semantic space
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Sociometric space
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A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
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space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
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A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
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These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
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Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
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interpersonal relations
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one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
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It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
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fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
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is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
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or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
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durations
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speeds
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rates
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accelerations
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irreversible unidirectionality of time
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thermodynamics
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negentropy
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"time's arrow."
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Matter and energy
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Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
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Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
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kinetic energy
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potential energy
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rest mass energy
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Mass and energy are equivalent
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Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
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Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
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Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
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It is one form of process.
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information (H)
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Transmission of Information
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Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
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Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
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The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
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.) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
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. The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
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Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
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[The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
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meaning cannot be precisely measured
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Information is the negative of uncertainty.
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information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
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The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
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If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
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Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
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There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
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organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
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If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
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The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
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the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
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entropy becomes a measure of the probability
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Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
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according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
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therefore no principle of the conservation of information
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The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
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but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
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. Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
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transforms information into negative entropy
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smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
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calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
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the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
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in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
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amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
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In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
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the flow of raw materials through societies
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Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
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I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
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Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
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transformations go on in living systems
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One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
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the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
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Matter-energy and information always flow together
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Information is always borne on a marker
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. Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
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If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
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Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
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example
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example
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develop normally
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have appropriate information inputs in infancy
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pairs of antonyms
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one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
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the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
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System
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A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
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.The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
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Conceptual system
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Units
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terms
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Relationships
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a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
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expressed by words
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or by logical or mathematical symbols
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operations
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The conceptual systems of science
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observer
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selects
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particular sets to study
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Variable
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Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
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conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
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Indicator
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an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
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Function
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a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
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Any function is a simple conceptual system
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Parameter
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An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
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The state of a conceptual system
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the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
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Formal identity
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variables
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varies comparably to a variable in another system
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If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
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Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
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Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
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A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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Concrete system
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a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
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Units
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are also concrete systems
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Relationships
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spatial
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temporal
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spatiotemporal
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causal
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Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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patterns of relationships or processes
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The observer of a concrete system
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distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
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physical proximity of its units
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similarity of its units
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common fate of its units
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distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
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Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
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Variable of a concrete system
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Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
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which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
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Examples
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number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
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A variable is intrasystemic
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not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
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The state of a concrete system
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its structure
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represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
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Open system
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Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
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Closed system
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impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
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special case
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No actual concrete system is completely closed
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In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
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Nonliving system
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the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
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Living system
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a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
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They all have the following characteristics:
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open systems
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inputs
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throughputs
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outputs
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of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
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maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
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by taking in inputs
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higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
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than their outputs
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The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
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In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
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To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
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entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
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They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
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They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
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or have a charter
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blueprint
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program
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of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
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may also include nonliving components.
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They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
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other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
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Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
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They can exist only in a certain environment
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change in their environment
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produces stresses
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Totipotential system
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capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
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Partipotential system
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does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
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A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
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parasitic
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symbiotic
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Fully functioning system
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when it
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Partially functioning system
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it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
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Abstracted system
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Units
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relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
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Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
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Relationships
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The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
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these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
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The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
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An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
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representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
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Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
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are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
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spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
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their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
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important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
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Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
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we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
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intensity of interaction
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in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
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To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
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This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools.
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PARSONS
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the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
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culture
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cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
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The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
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RUESCH
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A social system is a behavioral system
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It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
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The roles are the units of a social system
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On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
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What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
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To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
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system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
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evolution
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differentiation
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growth
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from earlier and simpler forms and functions
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capacities for specializations and gradients
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[action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
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Abstracted versus concrete systems
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One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
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A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
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If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
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It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
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Open Source Completely 3-D Printable Centrifuge - Appropedia, the sustainability wiki - 0 views
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"Centrifuges are commonly required devices in medical diagnostics facilities as well as scientific laboratories. Although there are commercial and open source centrifuges, the costs of the former and the required electricity to operate the latter limit accessibility in resource-constrained settings. There is a need for low-cost, human-powered, verified, and reliable lab-scale centrifuges. This study provides the designs for a low-cost 100% 3-D printed centrifuge, which can be fabricated on any low-cost RepRap-class (self-replicating rapid prototyper) fused filament fabrication (FFF)- or fused particle fabrication (FPF)-based 3-D printer. In addition, validation procedures are provided using a web camera and free and open source software. This paper provides the complete open source plans, including instructions for the fabrication and operation of a hand-powered centrifuge. This study successfully tested and validated the instrument, which can be operated anywhere in the world with no electricity inputs, obtaining a radial velocity of over 1750 rpm and over 50 N of relative centrifugal force. Using commercial filament, the instrument costs about U.S. $25, which is less than half of all commercially available systems. However, the costs can be dropped further using recycled plastics on open source systems for over 99% savings. The results are discussed in the context of resource-constrained medical and scientific facilities."
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Optics InfoBase: Optics Express - Active tremor cancellation by a "Smart" handheld vitr... - 0 views
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Card reader - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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Smart card
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There are two types of smart cards: contact and contactless. Both have an embedded microprocessor and memory. The smart card differs from the proximity card in that the microchip in the proximity card has only one function: to provide the reader with the card's identification number. The processor on the smart card has an embedded operating system and can handle multiple applications such as a cash card, a pre-paid membership card, or an access control card.
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A contactless card does not have to touch the reader or even be taken out of a wallet or purse. Most access control systems only read serial numbers of contactless smart cards and do not utilize the available memory. Card memory may be used for storing biometric data (i.e. fingerprint template) of a user. In such case a biometric reader first reads the template on the card and then compares it to the finger (hand, eye, etc.) presented by the user. In this way biometric data of users does not have to be distributed and stored in the memory of controllers or readers, which simplifies the system and reduces memory requirements.
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Free-Form Authority Models - P2P Foundation - 0 views
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‘authority models’in peer production, contrasts owner-centric authority models from free-form models
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define the authority models at work in such projects. The models define access and the workflow, and whether there is any quality control.
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the owner-centric model, entries can only be modified with the permission of a specific ‘owner’ who has to defend the integrity of his module.
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The free-form model connotes more of a sense that all users are on the “same level," and that expertise will be universally recognized and deferred to.
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the owner-centric authority model assumes the owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand
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In the case of the Wikipedia, the adherents of the owner-centric model, active in the pre-Wikipedia "Nupedia" model, lost out, and presumable, the success of Wikipedia has proven them wrong
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dominance of difficult people, trolls, and their enablers
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Far too much credence and respect accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled "trolls."
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Wikipedia has, to its credit, done something about the most serious trolling and other kinds of abuse: there is an Arbitration Committee that provides a process whereby the most disruptive users of Wikipedia can be ejected from the project. But there are myriad abuses and problems that never make it to mediation, let alone arbitration.
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most people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off-putting as to drive them away
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any person who can and wants to work politely with well-meaning
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root problem: anti-elitism, or lack of respect for expertise.
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Wikipedia lacks the habit or tradition of respect for expertise
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nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia
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shared by Kurt Laitner on 09 Jan 14
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Goodbye, Dilbert: 'The Rise of the Naked Economy' » Knowledge@Wharton - 2 views
knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/...bye-dilbert-rise-naked-economy
sensorica the rise of the naked economy book review
shared by Kurt Laitner on 09 Jan 14
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“teaming”: bringing together a team of professionals for a specific task
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The old cubicle-based, static company is increasingly being replaced by a more fluid and mobile model: “the constant assembly, disassembly, and reassembly of people, talent, and ideas around a range of challenges and opportunities.”
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Therefore, the new economy and its “seminomadic workforce” will require “new places to gather, work, live, and interact.”
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The consumer electronics company Plantronics, for example, knowing that on any given day 40% of its workforce will be working elsewhere, designed its corporate campus to only 60% capacity
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Their joint enterprise, NextSpace, became their first venture into what they call “coworking,” or the creation of “shared collaborative workspaces.”
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also nurtures what the authors call “managed serendipity” — ad hoc collaboration between people with diverging but complementary skills
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the number of coworking spaces worldwide has shot up from 30 in 2006 to 1,130 in 2011
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someone needs to keep an eye on the big picture, to “connect the dots.”
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workspaces are designed on a flexible, on-demand and as-needed basis
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Coonerty and Neuner found that the most productive collaborations tended to pair highly specialized experts with big-picture thinkers
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they were struck by the number of entrepreneurs and freelancers working at coffee shops in the area
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Business Talent Group
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Clients get the specialized help they need at a cost below that of a full-time employee or traditional consulting firm, and specialists are well compensated and rewarded with flexible schedules and a greater degree of choice about which projects to take.
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This has produced a new market dynamic in which the headhunter of yesteryear has been replaced by “talent brokers” who connect highly specialized talent with companies on a project-by-project basis
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Matthew Mullenweg, doesn’t have much faith in traditional office buildings or corporate campuses: “I would argue that most offices are full of people not working.”
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On the other hand, Mullenweg is a big believer in face-to-face collaboration and brainstorming, and flies his teams all over the globe to do so.
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He also set up an informal workspace in San Francisco called the Lounge
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Additionally, a 2010 Kauffman-Rand study worried that employer-based health insurance, by discouraging risk-taking, will be an ongoing drag on entrepreneurship
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the problem of payroll taxes for freelancers
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up to 44% of independent workers encounter difficulty getting paid fully for their work
(109) Open Hand Project - 0 views
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4.1.D. Peer governance in peer production? - P2P Foundation - 0 views
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quality control
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access and the workflow
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The free-form model, which Wikipedia employs, allows anyone to edit any entry at any time.
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the owner-centric model
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permission of a specific ‘owner’ who has to defend the integrity of his module.
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different assumptions and effects.
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The free-form model connotes more of a sense that all users are on the “same level," and that expertise will be universally recognized and deferred to
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the creator of an entry is spared the trouble of reviewing every change before it is integrated, as well as the need to perform the integration
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the owner-centric authority model assumes the owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand,
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and all others must defer to them.
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the owner must review all modification proposals, and take the time to integrate the good ones.
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The owner-centric model is better for quality, but takes more time, while the free-form model increases scope of coverage and is very fast.
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'equipotentiality'
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rules are generated within the community itself, though mostly in the early phases. After a while, they tend to consolidate and they are a given for the new participants who come later
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a process of socialization is crucial to eventual acceptance . The process is akin to the tradition of artisanship, which has been used in the three-degree system of original freemasonry as well: apprentice, companion (fellow craft), master. But it is implied rather than formalized.
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Crucial to the success of many collaborative projects is their implementation of the reputation schemes.
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Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views
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What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
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Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group.
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Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
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Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.
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humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.
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The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
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Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
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Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
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Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
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Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas
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It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt
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Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.
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The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
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The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
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Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
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Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
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five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing
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Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,
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shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
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What if government is not involved in the shaming?
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Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?
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Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
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vertical agitation
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Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
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But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
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corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success
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shame and reputation interact
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in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand
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Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
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why we learned to speak.1
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Language
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The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
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allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.
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in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
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Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
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Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.
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What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?
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We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
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what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:
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Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.
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Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves
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Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high
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In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,
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which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.
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Today's world allows for amorphous identities
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It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
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Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.
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Some people have no shame
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shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative
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a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly
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if the payoff is high enough
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There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
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shame is not enough to catalyze major social change
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This is why punishment remains imperative.
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Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
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Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
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The role of non-rational mechanisms in convergence - social emotions like shame and guilt
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INSO-5-2015 - 0 views
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Scope: The scope is that of creating a Community, involving social innovators, researchers, citizens, policy makers, which will bring together on the one hand research actions and results and on the other implementation actions, new initiatives, and policy developments.
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help promote social innovation initiatives
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increase relevance of policies and actions
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development of a common understanding
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evidence and methodologies that contribute to social innovation up-scaling
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This does not concern only European but also international developments.
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Such a social innovation community could be seen also as a “network of networks”.
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Activities should include:
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rganisation of brokerage events to enhance the networking
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information and awareness activities t
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design strategies/activities for ensuring the best possible use of the research results
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the organisation of events aimed at identifying priorities for collaboration
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supporting grassroots experiments, replication, incubation and policy uptake of research results
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setting up of a network of 'Local Facilitators' for a better dissemination and uptake at all levels.
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EUR 3 million
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enable convergence towards a common understanding of social innovation as a tool and outcome.
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What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views
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Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
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Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
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the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
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Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
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they are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within… capitalism
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The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
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The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
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Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
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Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
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The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
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Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
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In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
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Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
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One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
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He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero
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As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
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Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
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Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
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Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
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In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
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There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?
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Design Like No One Is Patenting - How SparkFun Stays Ahead of the Pack - 0 views
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Electronics supplier SparkFun designs dozens of products a year and they haven’t patented a single one. It’s worked out pretty well so far.
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makes its living by shipping kits and components like bread boards, servo motors and Arduino parts to a mixture of students, hobbyists, and professionals making prototypes
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the company has made its name is in a stable of its own custom parts and kits, the designs for which it gives away for free.
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“We find that people will copy your design no matter what you do,” she says. “You might as well just play the game and go ahead and innovate. It’s fun, it keeps us on our toes.”
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“The open source model just forces us to innovate,” says Boudreaux.
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the open hardware model means that SparkFun’s existence depends not on any particular product, but on an ongoing relationship with customers that’s not too dissimilar to the loyalty commanded by a fashion house.
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wolf of obsolescence is always at electronics’ door
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don’t spend much time worrying about the copyists, they just keep releasing new looks
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it’s about staying relevant and filling the needs of the community
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SparkFun’s rapid turnover model is one that echoes the fashion industry.
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keep their service exemplary
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listening to their customers
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developed a community of loyal users and fans
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weekly new product posts
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You can learn a lot about what a company cares about by looking at what they give away and what they protect.
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SparkFun’s actual value is in the community of fans and loyal customers that keep coming back, and the expertise under its roof in servicing their needs.
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Their catalog has about 2,500 items at any given time
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SparkFun orders parts from 500 suppliers
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15 new products every week
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hey retire products at a similar rate, due to either low sales, or obsolescence
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Of the 2,500 items, about 400 are things designed internally.
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To handle the pace of change, SparkFun needs to keep its inventory lean.
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“We try to do small runs and order in small quantities. Especially something that’s going to be obsolete quickly.”
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To help manage the demand, they use an in-house software system
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along with inventory and CMS management, tries to predict demand for different components and ensure they get ordered with sufficient lead time to account for how long it takes to get there.
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the innovation (revisions and new releases) here at SparkFun is organic and not planned,” says Boudreaux, “But we do a few things to make sure we are keeping up.”
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monitors all costumer feedback from emails to the comment section that is present on every page of the company’s site. They also ensure that team members have time to tinker in the office, write tutorials, and visit hackerspaces and maker events. “For us, designing (and revising) widgets is the job.”
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anyone in the company can suggest ideas and contribute designs.
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ideas run through an internal process of design, review, prototyping, testing and release.
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“They eat these products up, even if the products are not ready for the mainstream & educator community due to minimal documentation or stability.”
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symbiotic relationship with these early adopters, where feedback helps SparkFun revised and improve products for use by the rest of the community
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I don’t think they help much
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The risk of this rate of change is that SparkFun can end up outpacing some of their customers.
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“There’s balance in everything,” says Boudreaux, “Innovation does not necessarily need speed in order to create valuable change. Sometimes innovation works at a slower pace, but that does not mean it is any less valuable to those that benefit from it, and we are constantly balancing the needs of two very different customers.”
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unprotected and unencumbered by patents
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racing to get the latest, coolest things in the hands of its customers.
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patents
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“We have to be willing to kill ideas that don’t work, take a lot of tough criticism, and move fast. If we stay agile, we stay relevant.”
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cost $30,000 to $50,000
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USPTO is so backed up you’ll have to wait three to five years to even hear back on their decision.
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how much does technology change in five years?
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company’s blog where they’ve been documenting production and business practices for years.
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they even want to open source Sparkle. “It’s a wild ride,” she says, “but a fun one for sure.”
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The Baffler - 0 views
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This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
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the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
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His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
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gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
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innovation is the new selfishness
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mastery of public relations
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making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
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memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
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“Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
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It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
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ideological cleavage between two groups
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Richard Stallman
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Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
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“free software.”
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association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
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copyleft
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profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
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Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
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Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
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he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
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By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
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“open source”
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The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
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In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
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This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
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extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
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In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
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“open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
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While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
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Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
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O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
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The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
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A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
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much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
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O’Reilly’s bet wa
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the “cloud”
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licenses would cease to matter
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Since no code changed hands
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So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
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O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
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the freedom of the producer
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who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
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The most important freedom,
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is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
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O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
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The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
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According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
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Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
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must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
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the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
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Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
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Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
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“open to intellectual exchange”
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“open to competition”
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“For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
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“Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
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The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
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highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
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the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
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What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
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The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
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What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
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What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
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linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
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As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
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Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
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“If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
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everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
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The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
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No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
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apps might be displacing the browser
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the openness once taken for granted is no more
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Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
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One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
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This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
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Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
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Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
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Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
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infoware
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Yahoo
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their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
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The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
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to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
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Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
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The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
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in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
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he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
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Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
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O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
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What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
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find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
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By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
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O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
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assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
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Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
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tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
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“Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
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For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
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Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
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it can be easily corrected with facts
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to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
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Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
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For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
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As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
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pollution
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Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
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For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
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Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
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Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
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nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
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Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
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He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
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There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
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but his basic question
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“What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
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Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
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O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
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It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
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There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
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O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
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But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
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In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
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His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
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The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
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“the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
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As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
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In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
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The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
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meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
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O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
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how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
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O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
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Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
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Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
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His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
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Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
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Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
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Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
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Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
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The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
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News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
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There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.