'We try to avoid anxiety by getting rich, by making a hundred thousand dollars when we're twenty-one years of age, by becoming millionaires. Now none of those things lead to the joy, the creativity that I'm talking about. One can own the world and still be without the inner sense of pleasure, of joy, of courage, of creation. I think our society is in the midst of a vast change. The society that began at the Renaissance now is ending, and we are seeing the results of this ending of a social period in the fact that psychotherapy has grown with such great zest. Almost every other person in California is a psychotherapist. And this always happens when an age is dying. You see, the Greeks began their great age in the seventh, sixth centuries B.C., and then they talked of beauty and goodness and truth, all these great things that the philosophers talked about. But by the second century B.C., first century B.C., that had all been forgotten. The philosophers now talked about security, and they tried to help people get along with as little pain as possible, and they made mottoes for human beings. Beauty and truth and goodness had been lost. Our Renaissance began the modern age, and at the beginning of an age there are no psychotherapists. This is taken care of by religion and by art and by beauty, by music. But at the end of an age – every age down through history has been the same – every other person becomes a therapist, because there are no ways of ministering to people in need, and they form long lines to the psychotherapist's office. I think it's a sign of the decadence of the age, rather than a sign of our great intelligence.' -- Release

'Conformity is the attaining of societal goals by socially accepted means, while innovation is the attaining of those goals in unaccepted ways. Innovators find and create their own way to go about obtaining what they want, and a majority of the time, these new ways are considered to be socially unaccepted and deviant. Ritualism is the acceptance of the means but the forfeit of the goals. Ritualists continue to subscribe to the means, but they have rejected the overall goal; they are not viewed as deviant. Retreatism is the rejection of both the means and the goals. Retreaters want to find a way to escape from everything and therefore reject the goals and the means and are seen as deviant. Rebellion is a combination of rejection of societal goals and means and a substitution of other goals and means. Innovation and ritualism are the pure cases of anomie as Merton defined it because in both cases there is a discontinuity between goals and means.'

'Over time as the forest matures and passes into the late part of its growth phase, the mechanisms of self-regulation become highly diverse and finely tuned. Species and organisms are progressively more specialized and efficient in using the energy and nutrients available in their niche. Indeed, the whole forest becomes extremely efficient-in a sense, it effectively adapts to maximize the production of biomass from the flows of sunlight, water, and nutrients it gets from its environment. In the process, redundancies in the forest's ecological network-like multiple nitrogen fixers-are pruned away. New plants and animals find fewer niches to exploit, so the steady increase in diversity of species and organisms slows and may even decline. This growth phase can't go on indefinitely. Holling implies-very much as Tainter argues in his theory-that the forest's ever-greater connectedness and efficiency eventually produce dim­inishing returns by reducing its capacity to cope with severe outside shocks. Essentially, the ecosystem becomes less resilient. The forest's interdependent trees, worms, beetles, and the like become so well adapted to a specific range of circumstances-and so well organized as an efficient and productive system-that when a shock pushes the forest far outside that range, it can't cope. Also, the forest's high connectedness helps any shock travel faster across the ecosystem. And finally, the forest's high efficiency makes it harder for it to realize its rising potential for novelty.'

'Edwin Vieira, Jr: To call these actions "conspiracy" may or may not be correct, depending on whether the ends envisioned or the means employed are illegal or immoral. But to deny that they are concerted actions of particular people, intentionally directed to some specific goals believed by those people to be beneficial to themselves, and that they are usually more successful, because they are concerted, than similar actions by isolated individuals, is ridiculous. Sometimes these groups attain so much economic, political, or military power or influence that, for a time, they "direct" (or seem to "direct") a society's course, or important aspects of it. ... But we must remember that competition always develops among existing groups, causes some old groups to disappear, and stimulates the formation of new groups. So we might say that there is "sporadic direction", or "intermittent direction", and certainly "competition in direction", but not "permanent direction" by any one group.'

'Social action is the eventual result of social mood change, not the cause of social mood change. Cautious businessmen cause recession. A happy population makes leaders appear talented. Depressed and fearful people are susceptible to epidemics. Increasingly optimistic people make the stock market rise. Outraged people seek out scandals. A desire to speculate fosters the availability of derivatives. Fearful and angry people make war. People who want to smile choose happy music. Nervous people test nuclear bombs. -- A Temporal Continuum of Socionomic Response: Socionomic actions fall along an open-ended continuum of delay following the initial impetus from social mood, from immediate (e.g. stock market trends) through intermediate (e.g. styles of popular entertainment) to eventual (e.g. climates of peace and war). This continuum makes earlier sociometers leading indicators of later ones, which is one source of their utility. ...there is no leading indicator of social mood itself.'

'...energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain. Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel. Each new pocket of attention is harder to find...'

'From Ervin Laszlo’s book Macroshift: #4(a). The Breakdown Phase: The values, worldviews, and ethics of a critical mass of people in society is resistant to change, or changes too slowly, and the established institutions are too rigid to allow for timely transformation. Social complexity, coupled with a degenerating environment, creates unmanageable stresses. The social order is exposed to a series of crises that soon degenerate into conflict and violence. -- or -- #4(b). The Breakthrough Phase: The mindset of a critical mass of people evolves in time, shifting the culture of society toward a better adapted mode. As these changes take hold, the improved social order - governed by more adapted values, worldviews, and associated ethics - establishes itself. The social system stabilizes itself in its changed conditions.'

'Hoppe: All states must begin small. That makes it easy for people to run away. Yet states are by nature aggressive, as I have already explained. They can externalize the cost of aggression onto others, i.e., hapless tax-payers. They don't like to see productive people run away and try to capture them by expanding their territory. Empire building also bears the seeds of its own destruction. The closer a state comes to the ultimate goal of world domination and one-world government, the less reason is there to maintain its internal liberalism and do instead what all states are inclined to do anyway, i.e., to crack down and increase their exploitation of whatever productive people are still left. Consequently, with no additional tributaries available and domestic productivity stagnating or falling, the Empire's internal policies of bread and circuses can no longer be maintained. Economic crisis hits, and an impending economic meltdown will stimulate decentralizing tendencies... '

'Panarchy is a conceptual framework to account for the dual, and seemingly contradictory, characteristics of all complex systems – stability and change.'

'...social functionality operate within a space defined by the following three dimensions. #Knowledge: We use this stuff to learn. Specifically, we use it to learn from each other. For example, user reviews or Wikipedia. #Connection: We use this stuff to communicate, bond, meet, define affiliations and dislikes or just hang out where the people are. For example, friending... #Display: We use this stuff to communicate and manage presentations of ourselves, truthfully or not, to others. For example, user profiles or Flickr. No piece of social functionality is all one and none of the others, but they tend to be weighted differently in each case. Display often motivates contributions (and impacts the type of contributions) made via Knowledge and Connection functionality. ...it's crucially important for motivating contribution and can actually stabilize and help self-regulate systems of social functionality. ...the three Display dimensions: Status, Reputation and Esteem – form a continuum.'

'momentum, confidence, fear and greed are the four forces I recognise, not the five you mention.'

'...any one can contribute just as much as he or she wants and will be peer-reviewed on an equal footing, taking into account nothing else but the information he or she conveys. Any single individual can be weak, faulty, frail and prone to failure. But when information is owned by all of us, and anyone is able to collaborate and improve upon it, then we can tap into the collective brilliance of mankind without worrying about who gets credit. ANONYMOUS also believes ensuring a minimal degree of anonymity is the only way to safeguard an organization from having a leader / a group of leaders, and the personal cultus which usually ensues from this. ANONYMOUS is exactly designed to be completely transparent. Anybody can join and look at what we are doing, contribute, or get involved to the extent which he or she chooses. This in fact makes it impossible to ‘infiltrate’ us – either you are or you are not ANONYMOUS, there just is no real third option.'

'Every organization and company is a tribe, or a network of tribes-groups of 20 to 150 people that form naturally, in which everyone knows everyone else, or at least knows of them.' -- The same person displays different stage behaviours in different tribes and contexts. -- #Stage Four (We're great/Triadic): Values (authentic) drive activities/relationships. Spontaneous match-making having assumed shared values. -- Lower stages, shared values can't be assumed. -- #Stage Five (Life is great): A common enemy 'them' takes the form of an abstraction rather than another tribe. Hard to benchmark. Visit don't stay. -- Don't just hire best and brightest else you will stagnate at Stage Three. - #Stage Three (I'm great/Dyadic): Endless cloning/individuation cycles. Values have to be made explicit before attempting match. @44:05 See tribe stage types in social network map. Hub-and-spokes meshed using triadic connections. -- Rhetoric: Shift up stages with deliberative; stabilize with demonstrative.

'The balances are unstable. You can only make it last a little longer. You cannot create it forever. It is temporary. Always. The three balances are: #Diversity [vs] Homogeneity #Open Mind [vs] Closed Mind #Public Information Flow [vs] Private Information Flow (or Transparency [vs] Secretiveness)'

'The counter-productive actions of states are legitimized to the citizenry by the fact that each member of the cluster is engaging in the same behaviour. Collapse, which requires a power vacuum, is not possible unless the whole cluster collapses at once... Tainter: "Peer polity systems tend to evolve toward greater complexity in lockstep fashion as, driven by competition, each partner imitates new organizational, technological, and military features developed by its competitors. The marginal return on such developments declines, as each new military breakthrough is met by some counter-measure, and so brings no increased advantage or security on a lasting basis. A society trapped in a competitive peer polity system must invest more and more for no increased return, and is thereby economically weakened. And yet the option of withdrawal or collapse does not exist. Peer polity competition drives increased complexity and resource consumption regardless of cost, human or ecological."'

'Wikileaks uses individual superempowerment -- the ability of one individual to do what it took a large company or government agency to do a couple of decades ago -- to its advantage. In fact, the site is designed as a tool to confer superempowerment to anybody that connects to it. -- "...in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems." -- Julian's focus appears to be on disrupting/slowing the decision making cycles (OODA loops) of organizational opponents through a "secrecy tax" (a tax that is radically increased through leaks). ...he maintains that any organization unable to respond to environmental changes, due to very slow decision making cycles, will eventually succumb to competitors.'

'The key to the game is that it does not foster aggression or competitiveness. ...it is no psycho-sexual drama of the fuckers and fucked - the possibilities are greatly expanded! ...penetration of the defence by two opposing teams imposes upon the defence the task of counterbalancing their disadvantage through sowing the seeds of discord in an alliance which can only be temporary. This will be achieved through exhortation, body language, and an ability to manoeuvre the ball and players into such a position that one opposing team will realise that its interests are better served by breaking off the attack and allying themselves with the defending team. Bearing in mind that such a decision will not necessarily be immediate, a team may well find itself split between two alliances. Such a situation opens them up to the possibility of their enemies uniting, making maximum use of this confusion. 3-sided football is a game of skill, persuasion and psychogeography.'

'Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal. ...the emerging complexity of our social and political structures, composed of many interacting agents, combined with the increasing importance of network forms of organization, enabled by technologies that increase connectivity, propels the world system towards a transformation that culminates in a global political environment that is made up of a diversity of spheres of governance, the whole of which is called panarchy. To clarify, global linkages between individuals and groups create transnational networks consisting of shared norms and goals.'

'I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy. While the security hackers were attacking the security economy at the center of power and authority in the pre-web days, these attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are. They are showing that Top 100 lists can be gamed and that entertaining content can reach mass popularity without having any commercial intentions (regardless of whether or not someone decided to commercialize it on the other side). Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture.'

Graphic: Resilience and Adaptive Cycles in Human Natural Systems - The Simplified Panarchy Model: Phases: #Building/Accumulation (Exploitation) #Locked-in (Conservation) #Creative Destruction (Release) #Renewal (Reorganisation)

'Three-sided football is a variation of football with three teams instead of the usual two. Played on a hexagonal pitch, the game can be adapted for similarity to soccer as well as other versions of football. Unlike in conventional football, where the winner is determined by the highest scoring of the two teams, no score is kept of the goals which a team scores, but conversely a count is taken of the number of goals conceded and the winning team is that which concedes the least number of goals. The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle.'