Starhawk's Pantheon of Organizational Archetypes

• Dragon - keeps the boundaries defined for the group.
• Crows - are exploratory, finding new directions and establishing "the vision" for the group.
• Spider - are the networkers that keep everyone communicating with each other.
• Snakes - are the group psyhologists that look at underlying emotional processes.
• Grace - are the people who keep tabs on the group's over all energy level, deciding when the group should expand etc.
• Killdozers -are those who intervene when all the others fail. Killdozers never fail.

Two models of globalization by Seth Galbraith

from Seth Galbraith
to Lance Miller
date Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:13 AM
subject Re: Crops for food or cash

1. "The Law of Comparative Advantage" - move products from where they can be produced most efficiently to where they are most needed. This approach insists that all nations should be governed the same way - same taxes, tariffs, subsidies, copyright, trademark and patent laws etc - but only works if nations are developed differently - different levels and types of industry and agriculture, different patterns of education, social structure and wealth, different technology. This model is most darkly epitomized by the US military-industrial complex sharing steel technology only with selected allies, and the modern push for international software and gene patents.

2. Allow ideas (and people and media carrying those ideas) to move freely through your borders so that you can accumulated the best technology, and in the hope that it will be useful to other countries. This approach works even if other countries have different laws, but it allows other countries to develop similar technology and a similar pattern of living if they choose to do so. Japan after WWII was infamous for this development strategy and and modern China has a similar movement. (Notice that neither example required a high degree of political freedom or socially liberal attitudes.)

• Pekka Himanen's Hacker Ethic has three principles: passion, creativity and sharing.
• Commons-based Peer-production & Virtue cites four virtues: autonomy, creativity, benevolence, cooperation.
• Richard Florida's Creative Class has three values: meritocracy, diversity and individuality.

Notice the high degree of coherence:

• individuality/autonomy/passion
• meritocracy/creativity
• diversity/sharing/benevolence/cooperation

The coherence is even stronger than the intuitive connection between each cluster of words. Hacker passion is very individualistic - it's the guy working on a model railroad in his basement, not the social passion of participating in a group. The hacker creativity is very meritocratic (not self-expressive) and hacker sharing is very much about cooperating benevolently with diverse strangers.

Hackers have captured the heart of this movement and pulled it forward, but it is not limited to that group. Twitter, Wikipedia and other social networking projects are bringing a lot of people into the movement through Commons-based Peer-production. But if Richard Florida is right, the Creative Class is 26% of the US population, plus a large fraction of the Service Class whose creative contribution is not always apparent in their wages.

In other words individuality, meritocracy and sharing may be fundamental values of the majority in post-industrial America, Europe and some other places. But only a small fraction of that majority is active in the movement, because the majority aren't aware of their own existence as a class, and because the interests of this class have not been articulated as a project for our society.

The same was true of the industrial working class when Marx and Engels started writing The Communist Manifesto.

But the project of the industrial working class has been completed, and that class is steadily shrinking as manufacturing becomes automated and distributed. The 21st century is Our Time if you count yourself in the Creative Class, and unlike all previous social classes, the Creative Class is the only class with the potential to include everyone who wants to participate (with the Service Class as an important complimentary pole for people with less interest or opportunity for creative work.)

Food for locals or cash crop for global market

Cotton was in high demand throughout Europe and most settlers wanted to raise cotton for big profits. But Mexico demanded that the settlers produce corn, grain and beef, dictating which crops each settler would plant and harvest.

[ Santa Anna ] also imprisoned some cotton plantation owners who refused to raise their assigned crops, which were intended to be redistributed within Mexico instead of being exported. These actions triggered outrage throughout Mexico.

-Texas Revolution.Background [wikipedia]

Records show Irish lands exported food even during the worst years of the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.

-Great Irish Famine.Food exports to England [wikipedia]

I've posted these historical records to highlight how there is nothing new in the friction of "local food supply economy" versus "lassiez-faire capitalism cash crop economy". I've left out any research on Southeastern US cash crop economics, but can speak from life experience: the traditional southern diet is so unhealthily slanted towards starches and meats cooked in grease, and simple sugary dishes because while the region was almost totally agrarian before the end of WW II, not all agrarian societies are the same. In New England the yeoman farmer could direct some or all of his production towards foodstuffs good for his family. In the south, we know the cliche, "Cotton is King". Ever try to eat cotton?

Leaping to the present and projections for an economic depression or collapse, its good to keep in mind these frictions of local food supply versus the landowner's choice to utilize the land for a distant market. Just because the USA experiences an economic collapse, other places may stay wealthy. e. g. What if a land owner near Seattle chooses to grow X crop for wealthy people in Beijing? With the threat of post peak oil, the potential for an "Ethanol is King" scenario of fuel for wealthy foreigner's cars is entirely plausible.

Things will get interesting.

Points of Superiority

For every race or culture in the world, using the point in which they integrated the innovations of Hellenistic science/philosophy and/or British Industrialism, they were a higher people after that point.

It is not that Greeks or British are great, it is that they discovered things that make any people better, and any people can integrate.

The planet would have been an evolutionary failure without something like the innovations the Greeks and British introduced.

Beyond humans, the planet has also become a higher form of evolution by mining and moving of massive amounts of minerals all over the globe. This mass alteration shows the Gaia evolved to a more complex object in the universe.

Humans would be lower without math, sciences and industry, and the planet itself would be a lower rank of planet if no species had developed to alter it at such extreme pace.

Re: criteria

Whether planet with life or culture, neither have the luxury of existing in a pleasant stasis. There is always an outside invader, predator or competitor.

It is not romantic or aesthetic goals that we can hold up as positive examples, rather it is whatever contends with assaults from the outside and survives or mutates is the higher and more positive example/specimen.

Re: slavery invalidates superiority or claim of innovation

Innovations are never invalidated by slavery or atrocities committed in war. Moralists do not have a leverage from which to invalidate innovation. In our era of sentimental moralizing this may come as a surprise, since sentimentalists thought they had a rhetorical innovation in the form of "if it was accomplished by arbitrary force it is evil" . Ironically, it is the Technologist that has a leverage for invalidating innovation. It is not the mass enslaving or genocide of humans that invalidates, it is whether the innovation is open source. An innovation is a sin and blight on this earth if it's means of production or use are kept secret, and especially, if the secret is allowed to die when its group of users die.

Millions of the world's poor and most common people reuse innovations that originated in some horrible context of slavery or mass killing. There is no regret for this. The advice of moralist luddites, to abstain from these innovations, is the course that is regrettable and evil. In sex and technology: abstinence is the greatest perversion.

Seth Galbraith email response to me

Extend an olive branch by admitting that history's winners were not inherently more moral or clever than the losers - in fact the winners were often foolish and arrogant - they were just ahead of the curve adopting the best tools available.

You must justify your asserted hierarchy of higher/lower culture and higher/lower world. This is the uphill battle you can't lose if you want people to take your thesis seriously. Specifically you must show the reader that (A) s/he is materially and emotionally safer in your world and (B) this happy condition does not require great suffering in distant lands or future generations.

Distributed energy production questions answered by Seattle City Light

Hello,

I am a Fremont resident inquiring out of curiosity about Seattle City Light policy towards residents or businesses connecting their power generation to, and selling to, the Seattle City Light grid. To get a quick context of what I am exploring, please read the following:

"The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three prerequisites for growing a renewable energy industry: 1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy; 2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and 3) the utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop."

- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/opinion/16friedman.html

Any information would be helpful,

-Lance Miller

Hi Lance,

Thanks for your email. City Light is proud to have about 200 solar electric systems installed in our service territory. The majority of these are residential systems, though there are about 20 systems installed on businesses, plus 24 demonstration systems on schools, parks, libraries and other public buildings.

All of these systems are eligible for net metering, which is where if your system is producing more power than you can use at any moment, you can send that energy back onto the electric grid and spin you meter backwards in the process, earning a credit for the electricity. System owners are also eligible for the WA State Renewable Energy Production Incentive which pays up to $5,000 per year for the energy produced (at $0.15 to $0.54 per kilowatt-hour generated).

We just put the finishing touches on a guide to installing solar electric systems and I've attached that here. More info can be found at www.seattle.gov/light/solar. Please let me know if you have more questions I can help answer.

Cheers,
Meg

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Meg Gluckman
Solar America City Coordinator

Seattle City Light
Conservation Division
206-684-4827

I'm an urban liberal who just can't seem to fit in with urban liberals

I'm currently a supporter of Mike McGinn for mayor of Seattle. I follow his campaign on Facebook [facebook.com/McGinnforMayor].

Lately I've had some intellectual friction with postings from McGinn. Let's start with this entry from McGinn: "Cary Moon of the People's Waterfront Coalition has written an excellent article on HAC detailing the many reasons why the deep-bore tunnel should not be constructed." >http://hugeasscity.com/2009/09/30/special-guest-post-tunnel-digest/.

I posted this response in the Facebook thread:

Read the posted article. Phrases like "vibrant urban street" and "incentives to not use cars" shouldn't be part of the discussion. This is a state highway, for throughput of relatively fast traffic in route from one point in the state to another, e.g. West Seattle to Shoreline.

A few days ago I weighed in another issue, McGinn agrees with the Mayor Nickels effort to ban guns from public property such as parks.

I don't encourage the carrying of firearms as a solution to anything, so I'm not pro-gun. But I think this ban is going to fail at the legal level, and end up costing money for the effort. I'm voting for McGinn regardless of this one issue, but feel it is playing the identity politics card for votes. McGinn doesn't need to do that, he's got many fine points.

Back to the Anti-Deep-Bore-Tunnel article. My family should be held up as the most model citizens when it comes to progressive transportation lifestyle. We walk or bike everywhere. Especially to work and for grocery shopping. We've located our residence so as to not need a car. But even as we are committed car-less, I see a certain kind of anti-car stance as a bad thing. I want to call it punitive identity politics. The Alaska Way Viaduct replacement as example, we have so-called progressives who want to sabotage the effort. They want to make something that isn't a state highway. To get to a final point of reference: I don't want to live in a city that isn't a city. A city absolutely must have some conduits of high speed intercourse with the globe. I agree that into the future we should have less or no cars, and "high speed intercourse" may all be online. I embrace that. But today, and in the next several years, we have a large constituency who need to drive, in a timely manner, from West Seattle to North Seattle, at hours when buses do not run. We have a democracy, those people should be served by city and state services. It is slightly fascist for a portion of our constituency to dictate a car-less agenda to those who rely on cars for employment and their paycheck.

ttylr

I did not begin to use computers till the early 1990's. My first experiences where at UALR [wikipedia], using a VAX unix system and text only internet. In 1995-6, the World Wide Web exploded into wide use, and I was in a place with 24/7 access to a computer lab. My life, and the world, were changed forever.

From 1996 on, I began using a Unix command prompt for access to email, web pages, and a shell prompt [wikipedia]. I felt immediately at home on the command line. And let me add a qualifier: on an inter-networked command prompt. In the early 90's I had used DOS, and the concepts and ease of use did not flow so well. Once I got on Unix, and the shell prompt had an ubiquitous internet connected to it, then the operating system made sense. On the other hand, DOS, especially if one cannot get to the internet from the command prompt, was too useless to make sense.

I've attributed my ease of "grokking" Unix and the Internet to a very odd and rare experience as a child. In 1972 I was in fourth grade, enrolled at Wakefield Elementary School in Little Rock Arkansas [map]. I was very much into reading, I spent many summer days riding the bus downtown and hanging out at the main library. Our little elementary school library was a favorite place also. One day I noticed a book in the math section: Networked Computers. I had just seen 2001: A Space Odyssey [wikipedia] in the theater, and knew computers could control a whole spaceship, talk with humans, plot to kill, et cetera, so I checked this cool looking book out to find out how they did that. The book turned out to be WAY over my head. It was not a simple howto book for children nor even an average college student. It was an honest to goodness technical science book on the inter-networking of computers.

What was bizarre about this book's existence is the date and location. By date I mean the internet was not invented till 1967, beginning as a DARPA project at five colleges in the western USA. By 1972 networking was certainly still only for government and business. So, what was a technical book on one of the most advanced technologies in the world doing at a children's library in the working class side of an Arkansas town?

I finally made a pretty good guess a few days ago, 36 years later, on that question. My answer (which is still just a guess) is the book was donated by someone who worked at the Teletype plant, which was about one mile away. I believe some eccentric engineer wanted to blow a young person's mind by the Gestalt method of teaching -basically by overwhelming the person with an intense exposure of a concept.

...and it worked, to this day I can remember one diagram in the book of computer terminals, a line depicting networking cable connection, and their numerical addresses printed underneath. Text on the page explained the routing. Below is my own re-creation of the graphic from memory:

The Teletype plant was not solely about technology to me, I played on the construction site on the weekends when no work was being done, and us kids called the woods between the plant and 65th Street the Teletype Woods.

Website for the Little Rock Teletype Plant.