If Hipstamatic hangs in and establishes itself as the go-to digital snapshot brand, it could double as a parable of commerce for the flat-world age: an industrial-era end-user experience without benefit of a workforce, a community or a pension plan.

"And on and on. If futurists have become almost too good at technological foresight, we remain woefully primitive in our abilities to examine and forecast changes to cultural, political, and social dynamics.

Why is this? There isn't a single cause. "

"There's a glum desperation in the air that's hard to escape: volatility, futility, and a McFuture ghoulishly wagging its skeletal finger at a lost generation."

"As developed in techniques like the door to door canvass, direct mail and, recently, Internet mobilization efforts, mobilizing politics divides the world into good versus evil, whips up emotion, and shuts down critical thought. A final element is the implication that those doing the mobilizing will rescue people. Senator Clinton voiced this perspective in the Democratic debate in Philadelphia last night, when she said she had devoted her entire life to “empowering people.�? Mobilizing politics is technocratic politics: control by well-intentioned but elitist experts who see themselves as separate from the people they are attempting to rescue.

A great challenge of our time is to develop an alternative to technocratic politics. We need a politics in which people are not empowered by leaders but rather empower themselves. "

"I would also add --- and this is something Henry and I have ben thinking about a lot --- that it is often not at all trivial to figure out what your interests are, or how to achieve them, and that (small-d) democrats should try to find ways to help people work that out. Actually having political clout is often going to depend on collective action, but this needs to be complemented by collective cognition, which is how people figure out what to want and how to achieve it. That, however, is part of a much larger and rather different story, for another time. "

"In the 1930′s psychoanalyst Charlotte Beradt recorded and collected people’s dreams during Hitler’s rise to power: The Third Reich of Dreams. The material had to be smuggled out of Germany in code. In his essay at the conclusion of the volume, published in 1966, Bruno Bettelheim remarked that it was a shocking experience reading this book of dreams and seeing how effectively the Nazis murdered sleep, forcing its enemies to dream dreams that showed that resistance was impossible and that safety lay only in compliance."

"What do I learn from this life lesson, buttressed as it is by a quotation from my favorite philosopher? Very simply, I learn that although as a blogger and an author of political writings I can with no effort at all proclaim on the largest of questions -- the future of capitalism, the possibility of socialism, the imperial thrust of American foreign policy -- when it comes to actually trying to change the world, the most I can hope to do is to make a tiny impact, utterly unnoticed by any regional, national, or transnational measures. Because the gap between what I earnestly want and what I can realistically accomplish is so vast, I must find quotidien satisfactions sufficient to sustain me, so that I will, day after day, year after year, continue to make the effort. Not to do so would be shameful, an abdication of my humanity. But to expect triumphs, or even measurable results, would be foolish indeed."

Differentiates some of the categories that connect social media and political change.

"This time when we go down it will be global. There are no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. Technology, which has obliterated the constraints of time and space, has turned our global village into a global death trap. The fate of Easter Island will be writ large across the broad expanse of planet Earth."

"The number and density of feelings of this kind in my life lately has a lot to do with why I found President Obama’s “Win the Future” slogan to be one of the more repellant political visions of the past three decades.....

Behind the slogan was the 21st Century version of dark satanic mills: we must be ever more dire and invasive in the way we ratchet competitive pressures into education and work, ever more aggressive in how we extract productivity at every stage of social and economic life. The speed setting on the treadmill must go up each week without fail. The usual range of boogeymen was trotted out: in China they are prepared to eat their own young, so we must as well! In India they chain their elementary-school students to a slave barge fueled by the study of calculus and SQL, and so must we! "

"At its best, revolution is an urban phenomenon. Suburbia is counterrevolutionary by design. For revolution, you need to converge, to live in public, to become the public, and that’s a geographical as well as a political phenomenon. The history of revolution is the history of great public spaces: the Place de la Concorde during the French Revolution

"Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It's a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning)

"Transhumanism is a big, complicated, sprawling idea. The central concept – that humans can be made better with technology – touches on a lot of hopes and fears about the future of humanity. Though I’m always going on about how great human enhancement could be, I’ve got my fair share of fears myself. But my fears are probably way different than many of your fears. But how in the world can we represent those concerns? As it turns out, I’ve found a pretty good set of archetypes that represent our hopes and fears: Marvel Comic’s Avengers."

News post on an optimistic report on changing world energy supplies. We just need to divert 3% of world GDP to efficiency, renewables, and infrastructure. Whew!

"Fostering innovation, in other words, isn't just a matter of improving the quantity or quality of math and science education. It's a matter of restructuring how we approach and teach all our subjects, from the liberal arts to math, science and engineering. And it means focusing as much on teaching how to combine those fields of knowledge and think in flexible, integrative, and creative ways, as we do on the subject matter itself. "

"The shift of balance from the institutional society to the network society will topple dictators, bring down governments, occasionally create terror and mayhem, create economic risk and opportunity, and quickly eliminate some traditional civic and state institutions. Things will seem stable one minute and unstable the next. Sometimes institutional power will out for good or bad (as depressingly seems to be the case in Libya- not least because of the weakness of international institutions.) Often though, institutions and their leaders will be crushed by the power of networks. It creates new possibilities alongside new risks. Our success as a movement is determined by our ability to build enduring institutions of change out of networks of outrage. Wisconsin, Egypt, Tunisia, London, have all found themselves caught in this shift. Social media is only the very superficial surface of this"

"And so again and again, the realists, pundits and technocrats and advisors, find themselves dully amazed to be on the wrong side of history, staring forlornly from a ditch at the side of the road as their ride disappears into the distance. Eventually they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and say, “I knew it all along”. And a few days after that, “We must be realists about what will happen next”, as they restore a managerial composure, make scenarios, wargame out the possibilities, repaint and reframe what was for them a black swan event."

"The role of social networking and online communication in anti-authoritarian uprisings is a topic that gained special currency during the protests over the Iranian presidential election in June 2009. And the discussion often resonates with the familiar themes of what might be called the new digital populism: established authority shaking in its boots before the distributed power of the ‘netitizens. Watching American television coverage of the Egyptian events, in particular, one could be forgiven for supposing that new media sparked the uprising, since nothing in that country’s history over the past three decades is discussed as much as the arrival of Twitter and Facebook."

"So why does the image of a revolution enabled by social media continue to grab headlines and spark the interest of Western audiences, and what are the dangers of employing such imagery? My fear is that the hype about a Twitter/Facebook/YouTube revolution performs two functions: first, it depoliticizes our understanding of the conflicts, and second, it whitewashes the role of capitalism in suppressing democracy."

Over 100 years of daily and monthly temperature data collected in western Montana, USA are analyzed for long-term changes in seasonal averages and daily extremes.

I have a few theories, but they all start with the fact that writing is fundamentally about the final draft. It's not like writing code, say, where recording one's every change is standard practice. (Ask any coder worth her salt whether she uses a "version control system." If she says "no," well, she's not worth her salt.)

That's because code is so fragile, and simple changes can propagate in complex and unpredictable ways. So it would be stupid not to keep old versions -- i.e., versions that worked -- close at hand.

Writing is different. A writer explores, and as he explores, he purposely forgets the way he came.

"For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers* (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. "

"The fear of slippery slopes is not the fear of a legislative or judicial process leading by its own wicked logic to the abandonment of common sense. It’s the fear of cultural change. Or rather, the fear that the future will not always agree with you. Less charitably, it’s the fear that you might just be plumb wrong on a lot of things that you would find highly embarrassing to reconsider."

A task force assembled by the American Psychological Association hopes to spur more research on the role of the human mind in shaping the behaviors resulting in rising greenhouse-gas emissions as well as on traits that can impede an effective response to global warming and similar slow-building environmental risks.

So we live suspended in a surreal now, where the vast majority of media coverage is focused on the (irrelevant) Swap, our political systems are rusted into position (trying to keep cars, coal and cul-de-sacs going as long as possible) and yet the exploration of bright green cities has never been more exciting or the people exploring them more energized.

To be effective in this new world, you will need to master the skills of empathy and teamwork, as well as leadership and driving change. You will need to know how to function in a world that is not a hierarchy but a kaleidoscopic global team of teams, with no boundaries between sectors and change that happens at an escalating pace.

This is a rare moment in history. Are you ready to be a changemaker in the private sector, the citizen sector, or both? Do you and your employees have the necessary skills? How will you and your organization fit in this new world?

Going from great to good is the single most disruptive move a country, company, or person can make today. Here are five principles from going from great to good — contrasted with their Good to Great predecessors.

But here we are, all helpless. All talking about the wrong things. All strangling in the poison of scoring points against each other in a game that long since stopped being real, that then became farce, and is now just a sick joke. My head isn’t involved: I’m not going to whip out a better ten-point policy plan or even pretend to care to have undying passion for single-payer or this plan or that initiative, to judiciously stroke my chin and puff my pipe while I commend the approach of Sweden or Singapore or Massachusetts.

It all feels wrong, not just health care but so much else. And I think I give up now any hope that it can become right in anything like a well-ordered, incremental process where the participants just want to do the right thing. What it is, it is.

Doug Rushkoff and Rachel Dretzin documentary for PBS Frontline on digital culture.

by Howard Zinn from 2004

There is, I believe, a non-zero chance that an extended period of climate instability could induce a state that believes itself to be better able to adapt to global warming to slow its efforts to decarbonize in order to gain a lead over its more vulnerable rivals.

Astrobiology, International Journal of Astrobiology, and Origins of Life.  In the process I’ve become converted to a more expansive version panspermia – life here probably originated outside our solar system. I’ve also learned: panspermia is no longer a marginalized view.  It may not yet be the majority opinion, but it shows up often in journal articles and conference proceedings, if not in summaries intended for wider audiences.

“Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours.”

Noam Chomsky

Trying to persuade others or persuade the masses is a waste of time. Doing that only leads to mass embrace of yet another mediocre solution -- because the powers that manage our society know what to do with any mass behavior, including a mass appeal for change. They embrace it and make a profit from a fake solution, or a political career from the photo op of the embrace, but never delivering a solution or ending the popular outrage and discontent.

Complex dynamical systems, ranging from ecosystems to financial markets and the climate, can have tipping points at which a sudden shift to a contrasting dynamical regime may occur. Although predicting such critical points before they are reached is extremely difficult, work in different scientific fields is now suggesting the existence of generic early-warning signals that may indicate for a wide class of systems if a critical threshold is approaching.

The premise of Garret LoPorto’s manifesto is that “DaVincis” are the change-agents of society, and act the way they do because of their genes

Two cases of scientific disagreement: a lengthy argument (years) over publication of a letter in a journal and a quick online blog debate over a result of a chemistry experiment.

Antidote to the idea that universities are being undermined by OER. Universities will persist because they provide an institutional counterweight to business and government.

They go on to cite the work of Ben Fletcher, a British psychologist and business consultant. In his work helping managers become more flexible and tolerant, Fletcher found that while the managers could understand and accept the need to change the way they interacted with subordinates, they could rarely actually do so. Fletcher’s theory? That people are so conditioned to act the same way every day, that much of our behavior—even what we know is bad behavior—is habitual.

To that end, Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. He says that schools are made up primarily of two types of systems, operating systems and social systems, and makes the point that up to now, most efforts to improve schools have centered on changing the former, not the latter.

This optimism about human nature, however, seems to coexist with a pessimism about the scope for institutional change....This “human nature-optimism, institution-pessimism” is, if anything (and to simplify), the mirror image of my view.

In narrative contexts, inoculation refers to the function that opposing ideas may have in strengthening the ideas they critique. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a classic example: his false cries for help inured (or inoculated) his listeners to real cries

The truths outlined here: that a cold peace has descended, the mandate of 2008 is expended, and the results are a pathetic failure of wit, wisdom, and will -- stand by themselves. That the coalition of catastrophe is gathering, preaching burn and churn as its new policy -- burn carbon, churn land --- is evident to anyone who can read Dick Morris' new book, or watch MSNBC. Hooverism hovers close. Don't believe me, believe Paul Krugman.

There are two competing ideas on the process that governs the formation and maintenance of beliefs: 1) people maintain a belief because they have limited access to opposing beliefs, or 2) because they actively filter information in a way that avoids conflicting views. A new meta-analysis of past studies confirms the existence of active avoidance

The Economist’s Andrew Miller, a.k.a. Bagehot, has engaged Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times in a back-and-forth about the building blocks of revolution. They list criteria that would, if met, point toward revolution in Iran and they conclude that most of these antecedents are present in Iran today, suggesting that revolution is at possibly hand.

The lie of lifestyle activism is important in part because it bleeds off much of the energy that does exist in the world for social action. It also reveals some of the ways we deceive ourselves about effective civic engagement.

This post is a table of contents for finding the postings I’ve written over the years on the topic of pico-economics, i.e. George Ainslie’s model of what a horribly difficult time we have with impulse control.

by Alan Deutschman.

Can people really change? We tend to assume that circumstances change easily and often, but that people change rarely, slowly, and with great difficulty. But these assumptions are wrong.

The truth is that people can change easily and instantly. The real problem is that they also change back just as easily!

As we define it, a Theory of Change defines all building blocks required to bring about a given long-term goal. This set of connected building blocks--interchangeably referred to as outcomes, results, accomplishments, or preconditions is depicted on a map known as a pathway of change/change framework, which is a graphic representation of the change process.

Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, by Charles Kurzman

This is the central tenet of one of the great American religions. There's Football, there's Money, and then there's the Church of the Second Chance, which has many denominations and hundreds of forms of worship, rites, rituals, and practices. It is the religion of the self-help movement and the psycho-therapeutic industry.

But an even bigger cause, to my mind, is the issue of complexity. Our institutions are not configured to make deep, transformational change en masse. In terms of process, such a widescale change in education would involve a massive level of complexity that no-one really understands and is all but untenable in institutions that were designed to teach, not to change.

As I stated at the outset, the problems are ideological. Culturally we don't value education