Public Intelligence Blog

Amazon Page

Doug Rushkoff

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich Manifesto for Humanity — Hit Pause, Do NOT Let IT Fry Your Brain, March 21, 2013

In some ways this book picks up from Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway but it has its own structure and certainly makes an important contribution to our emerging public consciousness about the downside of anything to excess including information technology and capitalism. As Paul Strassman, author of The Squandered Computer: Evaluating the Business Alignment of Information Technologies, liked to say in the 1990′s and early 2000′s, “Information Technology generally provides a NEGATIVE return on investment” and “Information Technology makes bad management WORSE.” We’re there.

What Doug does that no one else has done, is a thoughtful dissection of our present circumstances, and a very able presentation of four deeply divisive and fatal social diseases that are directly related to how information technology “slices and dices” our present lives seemingly beyond our control:

01 Digiphenia [ADDICTION/SPLIT PERSONALITIES].

02 Overwinding [OVER-DOSED/BURNED OUT}.

03 Fractalnoia [SHATTERED MINDS/LOST SOULS].

04 Apocalypto [ASSIMILATED/CRAZY].

Bottom line up front: We are at risk of losing our humanity and being assimilated into a cyber-stein world in which we become automatons generating information that is sliced and diced totally divorced from ethics, community, Earth values, and so on. We must learn how to control this information technology we have unleashed.

Early insight: IT in its present design is moving individuals — including highly educated individuals, but most horrifyingly effective on the larger masses — DOWNWARDS toward reptilian instincts and irrational behavior, doing impulse things.

QUOTE (8): “When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause. We have time for this.”

Others have focused on “slow food” and other forms of simplicity living — e.g. Human Scale, Clock of the Long Now, and so on’ What Doug has done is more of a form of laboratory dissection of the rat — the IT tiny brain, it’s huge server butt, it’s privacy invading and data non-protecting limbs, and worst of all, its stomach where data is destroyed rather than cooked.

As an intelligence professional striving to define intelligence with integrity for the 21st Century, everything that this book talks about with respect to the pathologies of information technology and its cancerous effect on humanity, is totally consistent with what I know about the loss of the ability of think tanks and spy agencies to think.

The author focuses on the collapse of the narrative, the story being how civilization communicates aggregated validated wisdom to new generations. I am reminded of Will and Ariel Durant as well as Steve Denning’s book The Springboard. CORE to the message is that there is now a chasm — a huge chasm — between the staple stories of the past that “made sense” and the chaos of today where advertising runs amok, governments and corporations and universities and non-profits all tell blatant lies, and there is no comfortable place where transparency, truth, and trust can be reliably found.

In passing futurists are properly slammed.

QUOTE (17): “Futurism became less about predicting the future than pandering to those who sought to maintain an expired past.”

I’ve spent a lot of time these past six years thinking about the future in structured term (see all the authors, books, centers, and forecasts at Earth Intelligence Network) and I can offer three opinions with certainty:

01) Most governments do not plan for the future, and most corporations disenfranchise both the past and the future — pleading bankruptcy to eliminate all pension fund obligations, refusing to invest in infrastructure needed to mature.

02) With the exception of Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game (I recommend all books by both of them), no one I know of is thinking in whole systems terms — no one I know of is is truly committed to cause and effect and cascading feedback loops seven generations or iterations down.

03) With the exception of Herman Daly and a tiny handful of those who follow him as I do, no one is at any level, and certainly no government or international organization (e.g. the UN) is embracing true cost economics as the foundation for sound decision-making about the future.,

The greatest fault that the author finds — as I do in a piece online, “Chapter: Paradigms of Failure” — is with the systemic lies that characterize virtually all that we receive from the traditional segments that comprise civilization: academia, civil society including labor and religion, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit.

QUOTE (47): “The focus on immediate response engendered by the always on news becomes the new approach to governance….no one has time to think….what used to be called statecraft devolves into a constant struggle with crisis management.”

In the above the author is kinder to government than government deserves. What actually happens is that the political leadership micro-manages the narrative to leverage the Pavlovian themes that distract the public while micro-managing the Cabinet officers (especially State), all to the end of optimizing short-term financial gains for those that fund the political theater. In other words, *lies* are the root of non-strategy, non-policy, corrupt acquisition, and ineffective options — just look at Iraq, three trillion to destroy a once-working country and produce Fallujah mutant babies while destabilizing the entire region. And now, while some call for a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, others refuse to admit that the rush to an expensive war based on 935 now documented (truthout) lies should be “revisited.”

INSIGHT from the author: lacking goals over time to bring us all together toward future accomplishments, we end up fleeing what we perceive in the now. Alvin Toffler told me back in the late 1990′s that when he was in Malaysia in the 1980′s he was asked what his greatest fear was in the future and his one word answer was “fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism is dogma carried to its extreme. It *flourishes* in an environment where governments, corporations, and media all LIE.

OCCUPY is the first post narrative political movement. It has — the author tells us — dispenses with the left-right illusion (we are still teaching our children that there are only two parties in the USA instead of the eight accredited parties and 50 others), dispenses with sound-bite simplification, eschews end justifies the means; and for the “system,” is unweildy and unpredictable.

Sadly — my point of view having tried to get Occupy to focus on Electoral Reform — Occupy was quickly marginalized by the “system” mobilizing foundations and using tiny grants to pick Occupy apart one aspiring individual at a time.

There are rays of hope, including massive multiplayer games online. I personally do not like serious games in their current configuration for the simple reason that they are data free. As with Pentagon war games, the data base is rigged and not rooted in whole systems cause and effect or true cost economics. However, if the vision of Medard Gabel and others can be realized, there is every reason to believe that in the next ten years we will see an Open Source Agency (OSA) that funds the hub for the World Brain and the Global Game — in the latter, everyone plays themselves, has access to all relevant information, and has voice and vote on all issues they wish to weigh in on — all transparent, truthful, and therefore trusted.

This book merits slow reading and appreciative reflection. The author’s discussion of time is particularly interesting to me. He makes how we relate to time central to his story, observing that time in the digital era is not lineal but rather disembodied and associative — However, while “our” time cycles are hosed, “Earth Time” is still on its natural cycle and we are out of step — this may be one of the key insights in the book: IT creates false time frames that disconnect us from reality and nature — I believe Bill McKibbin among others would find this important.

This entire section is alone worth the price of the book. He cites Clay Shirky on information overload and filter failure, and Stewart Brand on the long time cycles, to that I would add David Weinberger’s books, especially Too Big to Know.

I was not expecting to find a discussion of money in this book but there is one, and it is important. Money is information. Here is one quote that is central to the matter, and completely supported by Matt Taibbi’s GRIFTOPIA among others:

QUOTE (147): “The shift to central currency not only slowed down the ascent of the middle class, it also led to high rates of poverty. The inability to maintain local businesses, urban squalor, and even the plauge.”

In brief, centralized currency is optimized for storage (hoarding and compound interest) instead of transactions and physical investment.

I will not spoil the ending but will only say that it is a helpful “sauna” on the impact of IT to humanity that is timely, and it crushes the prevailing conventional wisdom represented by all of the major governments, corporations, and conventional wisdom mindsets that comprise the “norm.”

This book is educational, provocative, and righteous. Of course there are those that will find any criticism of IT and “the singularity” to be blaspheme, but on balance I find Doug Rushkoff and his writing to be part of what little sanity we have left.

See Also:
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution
Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics (Manifesto Series)
Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
Dirty Electricity: Electrification and the Diseases of Civilization
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (New in Paper)

With best wishes to all,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

Vote and/or Comment on Review

Amazon Page

James Billington

4.0 out of 5 stars What is reason and logic? By what standard is paradise measured. March 4, 2008

By Henri Porter

By Henri Porter

Anyone who reads this and is still a bit unsure should read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s book WE and Djilas’ The New Class: An Analysis Of Communist System. If they are looking for the philosophical approach to the book, they should read Voegelin and any of his works that deal with the philosophical underpinning of what Billington is addressing in this fantastic work. Billington is a Rhodes Scholar. He is a visiting Professor to Harvard and Princeton. His works on Russia are definitive. This book being his best, is his dedication to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Demons. It is scary and brilliant. It answers the question of the two opposing “secret” warring groups one the proponents of freewill the others proponents of the collective and or the secular super powerful state. All this and according to Billington’s work, the most startling aspect, is that journalists are the very agents of this revolutionary activity. Puts a very scientism spin on things like global warming and afro-centrism.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Tony Juniper

5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ, gift and share — a roadmap for true cost valuation at citizen level, January 12, 2013

I have long been a fan of Herman Daly’s ecological economics and E.O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, a form of holistic analytics, and of course Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff, among other systems thinkers. This book, just published, is quite extraordinary, and in the absence of a Look Inside the Book offering, one of Amazon’s best features, I want to list the chapters here and point to an online resource that provides compelling information supportive of buying this book and then sharing it or gifting it to others.

Chapter 1: The Indispensable Dirt
Chapter 2: Life from Light
Chapter 3: Eco-innovation
Chapter 4: The Pollinators
Chapter 5: Ground Control
Chapter 6: Liquid Assets
Chapter 7: Sunken Billions
Chapter 8: Ocean Planet
Chapter 9: Insurance
Chapter 10: Natural Health Service
Chapter 11: False Economy?

To get right to the web page that does NOT offer the book for free, only provides the supporting references and comments on each reference, search for:

what-has-nature-ever-done-us-sources-and-references

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Rodrique Tremblay

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanist Manifesto Slams Religions, Foundation for Reflection, December 22, 2012

I bought this book on the recommendation of Pierre Cloutier in Quebec, and very deliberately as the first book to read on 22 December 2012 as Epoch B begins (see graphic above with book cover).

Across the entire book are what I now call E to the 5th: Empathy, Ethics, Ecology, Education, and Evolution. The bottom line of the book is clear: abandon religions as selective (and generally exclusionary) arbiters of morality, each severely hypocritical in having one morality for insiders and another for “others” (infidels, shiksas, whatever the name, moral disengagement is the rule and genocide is often the result).

When addressing really important books, I read the notes, bibliography, and index first. The notes are a second book — these are not normal cryptic notes, each note is a short exposition, and any reading of the book is incomplete without a reading of the notes. The bibliography is extraordinary, and my attention was immediately drawn to the authors honored with three or more books being cited: Karen Armstrong, Mario Bunge, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, A.C. Graylink, Robert Ingersoll, Immanuel Kant, Hans Kung, Paul Kurtz, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Baruch SPinoza, E. O. Wilson, and Robert Wright. Among them Kurtz, Singer, and Wright are central. Roughly 1,000 books are listed by title in the bibliography.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Jonathan P. Larson

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Eye Opener, Should be Mandatory Reading for War Colleges, Diplomats, and White SOF,November 9, 2012

I received this book as a gift. It is a bracing book and although short, at 130 pages, it merits slow and deliberate consideration. I got goose-bumps at multiple points and put the book down reflecting on how sad it is that our foreign policy and our military occupations are not better informed about the information peacekeeping (a term I coined in the 1990′s) possibilities of low-cost humans who speak the language and understand the nuances of conflict at the individual level.

This book is in every possible way, the absolute counterpart, contrast, and nay-sayer to the CIA-managed drone program that kills indiscriminately, at great expense, from which we will reap a continuing harvest of hatred, fear, and enduring mistrust.

Although I have read other books, and list them with Amazon links below, that offer similar insights, this is a first-person story with specifics that I consider so provocative and so valuable that I recommend it as assigned reading for every Special Operations A Team member, for every Special Operations schoolhouse, for every War College where we fail to teach White SOF as an alternative, and for every diplomat and international development employee, both at entry level and mid-career. I would go so far as to suggest that a week could usefully be spent by every conference group and foreign affairs class, on this book and the others listed below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Medard Gabel

5.0 out of 5 stars Revolutionary Sequel, Second Book in Series,October 30, 2012

This is the second book in the series, the first was Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond. They are different books, not the same book. This book brings in new perspectives and new initiatives from the design labs that occurred after the first book was published.

I have known Medard Gabel for close to a decade, and while disclosing that he is one of the contributors to the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network that I funded when I had money, I consider him, as the co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and as the designer of both the digital Earth Dashboard for the UN and the digital EarthGame for all of us, to be in a class of his own. He is unique.

Medard Gabel is modest–the blurbs do not do justice to him or his work or the incredibly talented and imaginative individuals (not just youth, but mid-career professionals) that he attracts to this calling.

I have participated in two of his design labs and recommend them to one an all. Everyone enters with their own issue area (urban planning, energy, whatever) and halfway through they experience the “aha” moment (epiphany for Republicans)–everything is connected and NOTHING can be planned, programmed, budgeted, or executed without integrating everything.

As Russell Ackoff likes to say, what is good for one part of the system might be very bad for all the other parts. Comprehensive architecture and prime design–all threats, all policies, all demographics–are the future.

Other high-level books that I recommend with this one are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Tom Atlee

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Tom Paine of Our Generation,October 10, 2012

I first met Tom when I sought him out after discovering his first book The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all and invited him to speak to an international gathering of information and intelligence professionals. In my view, his words to that group were as powerful as those of Howard Rheingold and John Perry Barlow, themselves speaking to the same conference a decade earlier. Since then I have read Tom’s second book Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change, and written my own manifesto, the second book in this series (Tom’s is the third, the first was Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness (Manifesto Series). To the extent that I have been constructively radicalized toward open everything and the core principles of transparency, truth, and trust, I owe a great debt to Tom and the Seattle wizards that I met because of him, not least Jon Ramer, Susan Cannon, and Sheri Herndon.

By way of contextual appreciation, I would also mention Harrison Owen, whose first book tom cites but whose most recent book I am compelled to present here, Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World, and Peggy Owen, whose most recent book is Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity. I am delighted that he also honors Jim Rough (Society’s Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People) and the team of Juanita Brown and David Isaacs (The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter among many others.

Tom provides both an appendix of key concepts with links for each that I have remixed and posted to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, and an excellent list of books that I am also posting with links. The triad is easily found online by searching for Tom Atlee Public Wisdom Trilogy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Carter Phipps

The Evolution Religion: Making Sense of Evolution,August 15, 2012

By F. Visser “Frank Visser”

Carter Phipps has been executive editor of the now defunct EnlightenNext magazine, formerly known as What is Enlightenment? In this role, Phipps did many interviews with leading authorities in the fields of science and spirituality. He also authored many essays, among which in 2007 an intriguing overview essay about the many meanings assigned to the term “evolution”, called “The REAL Evolution Debate”, in a special issue devoted to “The Mystery of Evolution”. Over the years, this essay grew into the book.

In this highly readable and informative essay, Phipps distinguished no less than twelve approaches to evolution. Usually only two or three reach the media spotlights (i.e. 1. neo-Darwinism and 7. Creationism, otherwise known as Intelligent Design), which severely limits the number of intellectual options available. (Though truth be told, perspectives 1-6 can be qualified as scientific; perspectives 7-12 are better seen as speculative, so Darwinism and Creationism are iconic for their respective fields).

Some of their current or historic representatives are listed here, Phipps mentions many more, including their main works and historical influences:

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Bernard Manin

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Wake Up Call – The Democracy That Never Was….,September 3, 2012

It is a telling sign of the ignorance across the USA and elsewhere that there is no other review of this book, a book that was brought to my attention recently when I made it known that I was beginning to question the US Constitution’s sanctity, having already concluded that the USA is as Matt Taibbi puts it so well in Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, a merger between criminal corrupt complicit government and criminal corrupt financial gangs whose crimes are either legalized or ignored (“control fraud”).

I find it very sad that I had to reach the age of 60 and have several years of unemployment on top of my life experience and multiple graduate degrees before I could ingest the reality that the USA is a democracy but that this does not mean popular self-rule, nor did the Founding Fathers every intend for it to be a direct democracy. The USA is a republic of, by, and for the wealthy, and I consider it quite timely and helpful that this book may be making a comeback in the consciousness of the avant guarde that always sets the stage for a revolution–and I do believe a revolution is coming in the USA.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Shlomo Sand (Author), Yael Lotan (Translator)

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 for Intelligence & Integrity, 4 For Lacking Visualizations,August 28, 2012

As an intelligence professional constantly dismayed by the lack of both intelligence and integrity in the profession, and as someone who has specialized in “Information Pathologies” for the last 20 years, I have to rate this book into my top 10% across over 1800 books reviewed here at Amazon, it is beyond a 5, it is a six. This is a profound, provocative book that re-establishes the gold standard in ethical, holistic analytics.

The book is too important to leave it as is, a bland 300+ pages of text. While the index and footnotes are world-class, there is no annotated bibliography and not a single visualization (I am loading three images above but they barely scratch the surface). This book needs to be republished and to include a series of at least ten but ideally closer to twenty visualizations of both the reality of Jewish communities over time, and the intellectual genealogy of the Jewish myth.

As the leading Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories (access my Amazon reviews by category and star rating at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog), and as an academic, government, and commercial intelligence professional who obsesses on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I put this book into not just my top 10% (roughly 200 books in past decade) but in my top DOZEN books across my lifetime. The methodical, ethical, integrative, holistic, balanced manner in which this author has carried out his work is in my view the GOLD STANDARD for what any intelligence professional should be capable of aspiring to. Certainly this book is ideal as a foundation for a critical analytics course in which the students–including especially mid-career students that have gotten by on cutting and pasting and regurgitating crap by others–are forced to confront the multiple realities that include every Information Pathology known to man, including history books that are fiction, political statements that are outright lies, and a recurring pattern of war crimes that regardless of what they are called (e.g. settlements, isolation by ghettoization, etcetera) are war crimes.

As I went through this masterful work, the phrase “render unto Ceasar” kept popping into my head. The author develops his arguments, his proofs, and his critique of the historiography of others in a most compelling manner (but absent the visualizations which drove me crazy throughout).

Read the rest of this entry »