Google is Dead

"Google is dead, long live google."

I am starting a new blog, it is at paxus.wordpress.com

There are lots of reasons why, one of them being it is good to maintain a diverse internet eco-system and not have all ones stuff under the google banner (blogspot/blogger is a google brand).

Come check me out over at my new house, which promises to be a proper superset of this blog from now on. Not exactly sure what (or if) i will use this one for.

Oh the theme of the new blog is that your passport to complaining, is your willingness to do something about it.

"it's impossible"

Andy, Sara and i left East Wind this afternoon to drive the thousand miles back east. Last night we had our last Villages in Sky meeting and got the survey initial survey results. 15 out of 16 as Winders felt good about the project, including a number of long time members and heavy hitters. i'm happy.

In the car today we finished the Phantom Tollbooth and again dramatically with poetic demons on his heals the ordinary kid Milo manages to rescue the banished princesses Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason (depicted above). Sara was bemused by my flood of tears as i read the last couple dozen pages in Shana's Subaru flying across Indiana.

The central msg is that the quest was impossible, but they succeeded anyway and i have a bit this feeling with everything from festival organizing to the negotiations in Copenhagen. We might pull it off, but if you were a betting person, you would not be putting money on us. Fortunately, that is not the crowd i seem to be hanging with these days.

Keyvah and Caroline get hitched !

One of my big attractions to Twin Oaks is that it is a place which inspires people to do things that other people are not even thinking about doing. To do things which some people think are impossible or at least incomprehensible. Caroline and Keyvah are doing such a thing today. Pairs of women get hitched all the time these days, but like their heterosexual counterparts, their primary motivation is their romantic connection to each other and secondary is their desire to have family together.

Both of these amazing women are key players in my son, Willow's life. And as only a parent can, i see their influence on him, Caroline's theatrics in the quirky YouTube videos they make together, Keyvah's "bored kid does complex math" tricks. And in a kind of spooky transference, Willow now seems to be able to tell when i am going to leave the room, moments before i actually get up and go - an art Caroline and Keyvah perfected sometime back.

And through this unorthodox home schooling they have built something Caroline coined "Framily". A fusion of friends and family. It turns out that the Nigerian proverb is right and it takes a village to raise a kid. But unlike the politicians and educators who spout this phrase i have seen it happen with my son and these wonderful women and our fluidly designed framily.

And i am excited to be on this journey with them and know they will help guide their own extraordinary kids.

Designing Rituals that Stick

My funological comrades and I are in a conversation about what the “central ritual” will be at the Villages in the Sky festival in the Ozarks in 2010. Central rituals play important roles in two of the inspirational events for VIS – Burning Man and the Rainbow Gathering.

At Burning Man there are actually two central rituals. The first (on the Saturday night) is the burning of the man. A 40 foot high effigy is set alight amongst dozens of fire dancers and a host of fireworks displays. Participants run in circles around the burning man and make incredible noise. Crystal actually does not think this is a ritual at all, he prefers to refer to it as “the spectacle” and it certainly is that.

On Sunday night the temple is burned. The temple is further out, and actually much larger overall It is made entirely of wood and is an incredibly intricate art piece. On it participants scribble what ever it is they want to let go of, often sadness about a loved one who passed in the last year (or anytime really). In sharp contrast to the burn of the man, this is a highly somber and quiet. Up close, both of these rituals are physically quite hot. They are also magnificent enuf so that they can be enjoyably viewed from a fairly significant distance.

At the Rainbow Gathering the central ritual mixes noise and quite. Part of the site selection for the part of the national parks which hosts these gatherings is that they need to have a space (for the national gatherings) which can accommodate 25,000 people standing in a large circle holding hands. For the first half of the fourth of July, rainbow kids (some of whom are in their 80s) are silent, doing their daily chores, heading toward a mid day gathering which comes together in a large silent circle. After some length of time which seems cosmologically determined, the kids run into the middle yelling and this is the signal for everyone to run in. Much dancing and partying ensues.

We will have tree houses and zip lines and hopefully turbine platforms as our environment. Presumably, there will be an open field to operate in, and n year one only a few hundred participants. And I believe that this ritual, and its power and effect on people will be one of the things which determines how many people come back for year 2 and beyond.

So I am in dialog with my new lover Premin, who lives in a spiritual resort which used to be a spiritual commune about what gives ritual life and bond people with them. She said these clever things:

The real important thing about ritual is, that it is not a ritual. that it is alive in every moment, that it makes sense, that it takes people into account, and when it doesn’t feel right or fitting any more, it can be changed. It grows with the moment, with the people. It takes presence, and not routine.

Casa Chats

I love this poster from the second world war, i want to put it up next to anti-freeze commercial which used to say "never pick up a stranger".

It is high tea at the Casa tonight, the conversation is about memetics and local complimentry currencies, wikis on sharing, distributed systems (as contrasted to decentralized), gift economies, rooftop remedies. Dante, Marc, Amylin, Slawek, Angie, Robin, Kadri - amazing talk, wonderful people.

I also found out a disturbing thing about Blogspot/blogger.  If you save an unpublished blog entry, people using google reader can read parts of it sometimes, even tho you have not released it to the public.  It is easy to imagine someone using an unpublished blog post as a place to vent only to find that they are telling people using google reader things they had no intention of telling them.  Bad bug google kids.

It's not too late

Dave Pollard writes a thoughtful blog. One of his most recent entries was rightly criticizing the government about it's inaction around climate change. And there is much to be critical of, including Obama's most recent speech on the topic, which is way too little given what the official science is telling us these days.

But this leads Dave to toy with the potentially self crippling conclusion, that we are "too late" and the game is over. Below is an extended version of the comment i wrote on his blog.

It is not too late. We are just too lazy.

I live in an eco-village in the US. We consumes 30% of the gasoline, per person of our mainstream counterparts. We use 10% of the home heating fuel and cooking gas and produces 10% of the trash of average US americans. And the lifestyle is in most ways indistinguishable from the American middle class, in terms of access to resources. And the really funny/tragic thing, is we are not even trying at it very hard. We dont prioritize sustainability over everything in our budgeting process, we often take cheap fixes instead of green ones.

What we do do well is sharing. We share 17 cars for 100 people, something virtually unheard of in the US, centralized shopping is a service which only the very rich have available to them and i enjoy everyday when i am at home. Growing most of our own food takes about 3% of our total labor (a bit higher than the national average) but most folx in the mainstream wont spend that amount of time on it.

Certainly Bush, Clinton and Gore can take heat for not doing anything at a national level to solve the climate crisis. But Twin Oaks came into being without government assistance and there is nothing which stops the model from replicating itself all over the country (there are about 8 communities in this model now, since our founding over 40 years ago).

Nothing except that old critique from kindergarten "Does not play well with others". The reason we cant share is that we cant talk to our neighbors. The reason we cant share is that we actually believe we need for all our stuff to sit idle almost all the time, because we have a tremendous fear that if we were to lend it out, even to close friends it might get broken or lost. We have (indirectly granted) decided that it is more important for our stuff not to be disturbed than for our planet to be habitable for our kids.

Almost everyday for the last week most of my food has been coming from the dumpsters at the market near Casa Robino. We go and rescue stuff and increasingly talk with vendors who give us the stuff they cant sell before it goes in the trash. We are building relationships and saving that energy (in the form of food). And part of what is surprising to me, is that there is no one else doing this. No poor people, no environmentalists, no life style anarchists.

It is not that there are no solutions our there, we are just pretending that the government is where they will all come from, so we dont have to organize them ourselves.

An idea a day

I used to work for the Standard Oil company that was pumping the North Slope of Alaska that was 50% controlled by British Petroleum. And at one point we had some of the BP senior managers breeze thru and i spent a lunch talking to a guy who was paid a lot o money to work in strategic planning. "Our job is to come up with one good idea a day|. At first i was really enchanted by this idea.

When i lived in Brno i actually tried to do it for a time. I got a small journal and really worked at coming up with something new and useful each day. But it was quickly exhausting. Not so much because i could not come up with the ideas, but because the ideas once hatched would call for attention and ultimately there was too much to do.

I have this feeling here in Am*dam. Like i am overwhelmed by the possibilities. And i have happily given up trying to focus. And am just bathing in the impossible number of options. My current favs are:

• Flogging as described in Digital Nomads
• Rooftop solutions: urban windmills and micro farming
  
• Incentive Interventionism - to deal with the US financial crisis
• Sharing is Daring
  
• Sharism - as a new religion
  

Digital Nomads: A How To Guide

There is a new lifestyle, which is right around the corner, facilitated by the collapsed borders within Europe and the advent of hand held internet technology and the rapid development of three separate types of websites typified by trashwiki.org, hitchwiki.org and bewelcome.org. Here is how it works.


You dont have any money and you are in Zagreb. You go to hitchwiki and it tells you the best place to get out of the city. But this is not all, short funds, but long time and internet access at the library, you read all about the routes to Am*dam, the hassles of the Ruhrgebiet (the megacity around Bonn/Cologne) and how to best avoid the Swiss police.

You have always believed in starting early, to show the first drivers you are serious about getting where you are going. Quickly, you are on the road. Your first driver is carpenter from Munich, who used to hitch when he was younger. You maintain the casual conversation and when he gets on his cell phone call from his girlfriend, you retreat to your own internet enabled cell phone. You look for the best exits near his planned end stop in Freiburg Germany. You remember when hitching was much harder, more guesses more walking. It is still quite daring, but you have the kind of confidence that Ford Prefect had reading the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

There is a small village of wagons about 3 miles from the most southern exit. They offer themselves as an overnight place for hitchers and there are several good reports from people who have passed thru. You walk from the exit to Star Village and are just in time to go dumpster diving for dinner.

Dumpster diving in Europe is often different than in the US. While they are not all open, the dumpsters which are dont suffer from the various discouragements used in the US, broken glass or motor oil sprayed on the food to keep pesky dumpster divers out. You borrow a bike and ride with Ellen of Star Village down to the local market which is just closing. She already has a relationship with several of the vendors and they have put food aside for her/ Food which was destined for the trash. Ellen has entered a lot about the Freiburg farmers market on trashwiki.
There personalities, their willingness to deal with strangers, the layout of the market and location of the best dumpsters and the best times to be there.

Back at Star Village various contributions make up the eclectic dinner. Carefully prepared food, some from the garden, some rescued the farmers market, a few things purchased. There is a young woman, Sabrina, who is also interested in hitching to the Netherlands. While she is not willing to get up at the crack of dawn, you're convinced you will do better hitching with her. And it is safer as well.

You get up early anyway the next morning. Help with some gardening, fix a couple of bike flat tires as your contribution to Star Villages all volunteer economy. You write your own entry in Hitchwiki encouraging those who come after you to Star Village to bring chocolate for Ellen (for an example of an excellent annotated hitchwiki map of good spots). And about your experience in the farmers market in trashwiki.

Sabrina gets up at almost 11 AM and you take the bus to the hitchwiki recommended hitching spot. The weather is threatening, but her smile brightens the day and my mood. A driver stops and after his admonishments of how women should not hitchhike, we settle into the drive to boarder town of Aachen. Sabrina gets a ride into the train station where she will pay for the last part of her travel. But i dont have the option, my wallet remains empty. The Bewelcome.org hospitality website shows several entries for Aachen, but there are no phone numbers and the local ambassador does not seem to be answering their phone. It's getting dark.

Hitching is largely useless at night. You could ask people at gas stations, a common practice in Germany, but you are shy, preferring exit ramps and willing drivers. The night is not threatening rain and the cars are not stopping, so you roll up in your sleeping bag under a big tree (tents are too bulky). Exhausted from walking between gas stations and exit ramps, from maintaining conversations in your limited English, the sadness about losing Sabrina's fair company too soon - the high speed traffic noise nearby does not slow your sleep.

The Dutch are not as friendly with hikers as the Germans. One driver explained that it is because all the student aged persons have rail passes and that there is limited number of hitchhikers and they are less trusted for being indigent.

Finally you arrive at your host home, a former squat called Zhaba, long since legalized on quite favorable terms. Natural candidates for radical hosting adventures. . The accommodations are not palacial, but they are friendly and reasonably clean. Happily they are experienced with guests and give you a set of keys as soon as you show up. You were guided there by Casa Radio which you found in BeWelcome.Org. Casa Radio is a combination placement service and city ore, which is directing you in. Casa Radio is actually a collection of hosting locations that you were in communication with before you left Croatia. They promised you a place tho they were not sure where it would be in Am*dam, as your plans solidified you texted Casa Radio and they confirmed your final location. Unable to afford the beautiful mass transit, you walk the last mile and half from the A2 exit to Zhaba. You're tired, but the places is comfortable, despite your space being quite small.

One of the most important services BeWelcome.org offered was low skill temp work for foreigners. They keep a listing of urban gardening, light construction and demolition work, dog walking, cleaning and cooking jobs. The website uses a reputation system, which almost all users put quite some energy into maintaining good online reputations. It was through offering better services like Casa Radios landing assistance and work opportunities for folx new in town that lead to it stealing most of the members to CouchSurfing.Com

In the morning there is muesli and left over fruit salad from the night before. A group of Zhaba kids will fix a leak in the roof after breakfast. You get to talking to Tatiana, who is writing a flog. Flogs were originally stories written by traveling bloggers would write about other peoples stories, written with the intention of selling ads (with Google Ad sense or similar services) and bringing in lots of readers. They were called flogs because they are in a blog format and they were peddled off to readers (flogged). It is a bit like soap opera writing, except that the characters are real and the stories twisted.

But Tatiana's flog has morphed also. It is her story of her adventures, designed to keep the readers excited by her unfolding story. But more than excited, Tatiana keeps a set of about 30 avid "premium readers" engadged in a personal e-mail dialog about her life.

"They are mostly parents and werents (people who wanted to be parents but were not). Some are having with Tatiana, who will occasionally drop reference to her correspondence with her advising aunt in her flog, her "aunt" is really the collective wisdom of her premium readers. Possibly unlike their actual children, premium readers find Tanya (Tatiana's digital identity) at least willing to listen and respond to their suggestions. Though Tanya offers little in the way of real concessions to her advisers, for her reckless lifestyle is part of what makes her so attractive.
Tanya is popular with tens of thousands of unique hits each day, but the premium readers are keeping Tatiana feed and entertained - tho she still hitchhikes and runs a foul of the authorities with some regularity. Tatiana is 19 and was born outside of Kiev.

This article can be found under tinyurl.com/digitalnomads and is being turned into a collective story at trashwiki.com/digitalnomads

Radical Hospitality

"How can the house have a bike?" Kaudry asks me as we walk home from the gezellig squat cafe at the Partick Fredrick Straat. I am wheeling one of the Casa Robino collective bicycles as we walk thru the well lit and rainy streets of Am*dam. She has just hitchhiked in from Estonia. 5 rides, 48 hours, one difficult driver who would not let her out, nearly no sleep. But her question does not come from exhaustion.

I explain that Robin has a hospitality mission, which she already knows, because he is putting her up and they have never met before. That part of that mission is to provide durable resources to the guests of the house. He does not think of these as his bikes, he thinks of them as our bikes - more precisely, the houses bikes. Sky repaired them all three before he and Kassia went to Copenhagen, their care and upkeep relies on the generosity and handiness of the endless cycle of guests who come thru the Casa.

It seems a somewhat foreign notion to her. i mention that it is like communism, recognizing that it is a weighty word from a person from Estonia. I tell her i was in Estonia, in 1991, when they kidnapped Gorbachev and her country declared independence. I spare her the longer version of our exciting escape with our Lithuanian bus drivers switching seats while driving to make sure we did not have to stop. Of Russian helicopters circling the Riga radio station and us hearing the animated Latvian news announcer reporting on the invasion getting cut off in mid-sentence and replaced with classical music as the tyrants stormed the station. Nor did i speak of us passing Russian tanks which closed off the very roads we were on moments after we passed. We rushing towards the west, to escape the unknown fate of the dissolving Soviet Union. She was perhaps 3 then, it is ancient history.

Earlier, back in the squat cafe i am talking with the charming German anarchist Kristian. He is completing his PhD in security architecture. He tells stories of how military police who are beating protesters in Geneva were shortly before using the same tactics in Kosovo. He points out that when we use civil liberties arguments to try to stop this type of repression we are disabling our ability to access a more revolutionary and rightious position, that the very idea of military police being turned on their own population is wrong. Rather than they screwed up by being too oppressive in this particular case.

He is telling me about the "New Anita" which is the cafe/bar which he helped remodel 3 years ago. Which somehow has managed for 2 decades to operate right off a main street in Am*dam without a liquor license, by negotiating with the authorities. These days are ending here, but they are well established now. A German woman sings a haunting song, in English - simple in lyrics, rich in expression. She is behind the circular bar, which Kristian and friends designed cleverly to double function as a stage for performers.

Kristian tells me that the New Anita is filled with artists types. "As opposed to activists?" i ask. And we agree that we wish they were the same group, yet somehow they are mostly not. And i flash on the brilliance of Casa Robino again. Where the activists and non-activists share the same crowded little space. Where the ideas of people dedicated to making the world a better place, come up over Cruesli with people who are just looking for a place to stay for free for a few night.

Kaudry will learn about communism here. Not the kind that ruthlessly oppressed her country for decades, but instead the kind that great memeticist Marx envisioned. [Robin rightly objects, it is not communism, but anarchism - no state and no private property.]

And long after she was long in bed, and Robin and Anu and i had finished our wild rambling conversation - so common after midnight here. And Kasper had sent back instructions from Syria on how to start my first wiki. i very appropriately, got the first few pages of SharingIsDaring.com up and running.

It has all the feel of the beginning of a revolution.

Eight Lanes and High Class Problems

The traffic pattern in this city is quite clever. Very often on middle sized center city streets there are 8 lanes of traffic, four in each direction. Most of my Yankee comrades are doing a double take here, because i have failed to identify these lanes: 2 sidewalk pedestrian, 2 dedicated bike lanes, 2 for cars and trucks and faster motorbikes and 2 for trams, active emergency vehicles and taxis which are carrying fares.

The effect is liberating. You can almost always cross the street, because generally these lanes are separated and there is not consistant traffic in any given lane. Bicyclists dont need to wear helmets and can go at a bike appropriate speed safely, worrying only about passing other bikes. The cars most often dont need to pay much attention to either the trams or the cyclists. The tram lanes are generally clear, tho the trams run as frequently as every 6 minutes during peak hours and adding taxis to these lanes gives the taxis a tremendous time advantage in traversing the city and make them faster than the trams or other cars and are operated by professional drivers.

There is also some level of color coding, the bike lanes are typically crimson in color. Thanks to Sky for the above picture. which shows better than anything on Google images the 4 distinct types of lanes in each direction.

Of course my darker green friends will not be happy about special privileges for affluent taxi riders. But for me what is key is the structure is already in place for peak oil driven petrol price spike. And the local gasoline prise is already $6.30/gallon here (something like $4/gal higher than the US?) And if gas doubles here, then the traffic/ridership on 6 of the 8 lanes will get a bit heavier and we will have fewer personal cars. Very civilized. In most US cities, doubling gas prices will have largely inelastic effect on personal car use, in part because there is little capacity of these streets to convert to other traffic modes - what you will get is pissed off car drivers.

The problem with Am*dam is that there are too many possibilities. i recently produced a document called Plan 9 (email me or enter a comment if you want a copy) which outlines 10 different projects i am excited about (Honest Seduction snuck in there as the 10th after the document was named.) And i sent this to some friends asking their help in paring it down with me. Already some great responses have come in, including an offer funding. But the problem is that there are still ideas not in Plan 9 that i am considering - like the urban farmers and sky dry (look for the 5 minutes of Bambi entry) which were being wonderfully thrown around at the Casa last night.

As the CEO of Federal Express said to the Cornell investment committee (when he and i both sat on the Board of Trustees, back in 1979) when we were looking at holding bonds which were yielding nearly 20% or selling them at a significant premium: "That is a high class problem."

Viva la Casa

Sometimes you just luck out. Casa Robino has the same magical "why isnt the whole world working this way?" feel to it i experienced when i visited the brilliant Barcelona squat Can Masdeu. Robin is working a straight job and sharing the wealth in the form of hospitality. Picture couch surfing, but on steroids.


When i showed up Kassia and Sky had just finished making a dinner which was composed almost completely of things which were gathered at the end of the farmers market. This is a step more civilized than dumpster diving. Produce vendors simply give the people who show up at the end of the market, things that are perfectly good, which they can no longer sell for cosmetic reasons. Vendors directed Sky and Kassia to where their left over food was and they made a wonderful and slightly eclectic meal. Which was videoed by Lily for her Free Food short movie.

The dinner was lusciously international: Lily from Vanuatu/Australia, Anu* from Finland, Anka* from Romania via art schools in Milan and Bremen, Aisha from the Netherlands via the Amma the hugging saint out of India, Kassia who is a yank, but her dad is Iranian, Mindy and Robin* are Dutch balanced by Sky and i holding down the fort for YankeeLand.



* indicates photo above

The conversation was animated, multifarious and fun - from hitch wiki (which i loved at first sight and promptly wrote and entry on hitching on sailboats), to internet facilitated sharing systems, to anarchists with straight jobs ("job" is a swear at Casa Robino, often being spelled out instead of said). To starting an Ashram in Am*dam. To voluntary adventures thru groundcrew.us To the nature of tough punks defending squats. To clown armys. To the bike crowded streets of Am*dam and the lack of Critical Mass actions here. And entire event laced with the sense of possibility which comes from someone being unusually generous. The conversations went late with switching participants - the last finishing well after 3 AM.

Robin pulled Casa Robino from couchsurfing.com because he was looking for something less transient, people who were looking to stay and create temporary community for weeks rather than days. Robin hosted a conference of internet hospitality sites and now works thru the bewelcome.org site.

And they just invited me to be part of their secret Facebook group - dont even bother looking.

Strange Religions

Xavier and Irene (Hawina's niece who lived at Twin Oaks for some month a couple years back) have been gracious hosts to the crashing Star family - which is constantly reconfiguring, but currently is Sky, Willow, Hawina and myself. We are staying in their small apartment in Heerlen, about half an hour walk from the German border on the southern edge of the Netherlands.

It costs 29 Euros to take the train from Heerlen to Am*dam (about $45). And we have had good news recently about our recent choice to become community supported activists. People have been inspired by our various projects and are being generous in supporting us. Despite Wall St crashing, activist stocks seem to be rising (some might argue because of it). So 29 Euros would seem accessible, especially since we want to support the efficient, comfortable, comprehensive Dutch mass transit system.

But it misses the point - the point which is about radical sharing. And about story telling. And about dropping social barriers. And about taking useful risks. And about modeling behaviors for a more sustainable future.

i am talking about hitchhiking.

The Dutch weather is perfect today - it is cloudy and threatening. So even if i am not now wet, i could be in moments. You get to be a hero for picking up someone at the edge of a storm. Many people wave, some indicate that they are only going a short distance or that their vehicles are filled with family or junk. One woman gives me a thumbs down, but she is the exception.

After perhaps 45 minutes (i am without cell phone these days, so my clock is gone), a car stops on the wide breakdown lane entering the highway to the north. He is going to Eindoven and on to Tilburg - this is far enough along my way to give up my good spot, for what might be a poor one further on.

He is totally charming. Speaks good English. He is an art lecturer, who amazingly makes his money from the entry fees to his lectures. He rents out auditorium space, self promotes and makes enough to live relatively comfortably. I can't conceive of someone doing this in the US, unless they had a huge name - and then thy would not do their own promotion.

We talk about Jackson Pollack who i have never understood (my lover Caroline, now in art school in Barcelona, has offered to explain him, but i wanted to do this face to face). And Andy Warhol (who he respects the intellect of, but is not impressed with his art). I ask him about Rembrant and the Night Watch and why it is so important. He talks about artists as revolutionaries, as challenging our perceptions of the world. In Pollacks case, he talks about revolutionizing the tools artists use- throwing out the brush and the eisal. I tell him stories, talk about the commune and of course memetics. He is enchanted, very glad he took the risk of picking up a hitchhiker.

We part in Tilburg. We never shared names - often it is part of the culture of hitching - to be vulernable and nearly intimate with someone and never know this label on their identity.

The Perfect Nag

i've never had a blog before. And i have a bunch of ideas which i think are important and i am going to hurl them into the blog as we go along and i am inspired to do so. Tonight's memetic construct is the perfect nag - this come from the work we did on an activist personal growth system called co-empowerment.

The basic idea is to design for failure. Especially with project which have lots of individual efforts which need support, designing a perfect nag is one method to increase the chances of success of your project. It goes something like this.

You have a task list. You have an ally who wants to support you with making progress on this list (but likely is not especially involved in your part of the project). They agree that that they are gong to call and check in with you about how you are progressing. This is called nagging.

Perfect nagging is when you premeditate the script for what your nag says when you fail to do something you have promised to do. For example, do they get angry with you? do they cheerfully suggest a new deadline or other possible solutions ? do they send stony cold signals and wait for you to be appropriately apologetic and make suggestions ? Depending on who you are, and what you need - different answers would make sense.

The robust designing of perfect nags could save the world.

And we might be too busy for that (or as Vonnegut said "we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.")

relatively rare mass mailing

Dearest Clan:

As most of you know, i do memetic analysis. This construct "Searching for John McCain" is one of the better designed campaign structures to take advantage of new voters use of internet search engines as advisors for the election. This project promotes the policy positions of McCains, in his own words in interviews on mainstream media websites. In what might be a close election (tho i think i am with Murdock on this one and Obama will win by a landslide) this tool might reach and influence 1% of voters.

If you have a blog or are willing to comment on other blogs, you can be part of this strategy.

Read the background information on:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/30/23057/4183/973/525851

and

http://www.jabberwonk.com/content/bombMcCain.htm ...

Or simply copy and post the following section of text with it's 9 key hyperlinks:

Who is John McCain, in his own words? McCain opposes raising the minimum wage. McCain's housing policy was built by lobbyists. McCain supports Bush's agenda to privatize social security. John McCain opposes extending guaranteed health insurance to children; McCain supports Bush's Iraq strategy. McCain wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. McCain opposes the GI Bill.

Do you really want to vote for John McCain?

Create your own McCain blurb at http://www.jabberwonk.com/content/bombMcCain.htm ...

Paxus at Twin Oaks
31 May 2K8

Changing the way people think

One of the reasons i love Abigail is that she does amazing work. Specifically, she runs SWAT - the sexual wellness advocacy team at University of Oregon in Eugene. This innovative program uses students work with interactive workshops and peer theatre work to present to other student groups about sexual assault and how to avoid it.
It is edgy, oft uncomfortable work as they do skits of acquaintance rape where the audience gets to interview the perpetrator, their friend who is convinced they have not done anything wrong and other characters who make this charged scenario more complicated. There are few places which are doing such innovative and experimental work and every school should be.



While in Eugene recently, Abigail and i did an Honest Seduction workshop together, which went pretty well. We were competing with a rare sunny day in Eugene and a folk music festival and still managed to get a room full of people, mostly because Abigail has a fan club in town.

But what was most fun and exciting about the visit was i got to do a presentation to her SWAT class and brainstorm about the next generation of what their work might look like. I presented the basic concepts we are working with in the honest seduction work.

I tried out my new Huxley rant. That this great author best known for Brave New World actually wrote (in my opinion) a better and more important book called Island. But what is fascinating about these two stories, the first dystopian and the second utopian, is that he two cultures Huxley uses the same tools: Sleep learning, mood altering drugs, social stratification, cohesive rituals. So it is, in my thinking with seduction.

Classical seduction (the pickup artist - "power over" type) has developed a tremendous number of tools over time. Honest seduction has much to learn from these pros. Specifically, if you change the intent with which you approach a new relationship, most of these classical tools are actually appropriate: humor, story telling, focused attention, fashion and scent, seductive attitudes and more.

What was most exciting about the SWAT worskhop was the prospect of adding Honest Seduction content to their work on stopping sexual violence. The thinking is that it is not enuf to be critical of what is wrong, there is a need to propose what kinds of behavior should replace it. "How to pick up girls* and keep them: An introduction to Honest Seduction" was a name for a new workshop (where the * was "boys, transgenders, etc"). My propogandist, revolutionary heart beats faster at the prospect.

What makes it all worthwhile

"Do you remember me ?" she asks smiling
"Vaguely." i answer truthfully, i often tell people "no" because i dont remember lots of people and give lots of workshops where they walk away with more of a sense of me than the other way around.

"We talked at Twin Oaks a number of years ago when i was a visitor. We had lunch together and i still remember and refer to the conversation."

Her name is Jen. She is a cross-pollinator. She has embraced an activist and i would argue a memeticists life style since visiting Twin Oaks after she finished her studies at Cornell. She lives at Tryon Life Farms where Sky and Kassia are staying for the summer.

And she gives some credit to me for her trajectory into this life. She works now to bring diverse networks of activists together at a person to person level, rather than a top to top approach.

It is reminders like this that have tremendous positive influence on me. That people are walking away influenced, activated and engadged. I once wrote to the Canadian rock performer Bruce Cockburn:

I don't measure our success in the number of progressive pieces of
legislation passed or nuclear reactors stopped or other campaigns won
- tho there have been a gratifying few. For me personally, it is
about the lives changed, about the people who because of our work see
the world differently and are now working for the many, rather than
just for themselves. If you look at things the same way, then you
can take partial credit for one more success - me.

Compersion, Quink and Pronoia

We are in the business of creating a new culture. Part of this is creating a new language. Turns out there are all kinds of words and concepts in English which are asymmetrically negative.

Jealousy is when you feel bad about your intimates relationship (or feared relationship) with someone else. What if you feel good about it ? There is a word, most people have never heard of it: compersion.

Quink is a word (coined by Tobias Kampf formerly known as Frodo) which is the opposite of trama, when a sudden and dramatic event permanently improves ones life.

Pronoia is the suspicion that the Universe is conspiring on your behalf. It is the antidote to paranoia. And has been popularized by my illusive friend Rob Brezsny.

Now with names for some of these positive concepts, try watching for them, dropping them into conversation (always ready to share the definition) and popularizing them.