As I started reading Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy today, I was delighted to discover the whole book is framed by the concept of neurodiversity — specifically, the notion that autism shouldn’t be conceived strictly as an impairment, but as one cognitive style among many, with its own strengths and weaknesses.

From the book:

I prefer the word “learning” to “recovery”; many autistics learn how to overcome their cognitive disadvantages. Would we say that a non-autistic person, as he or she grows, “recovers” from having the disabilities of a four-year-old? Or would we say that the person has learned a lot?

Personally, I started learning a lot more — and with a lot less anxiety, guilt, resentment, depression… I became a lot happier — when I came to terms with my autism-like cognitive style and worked with it rather than against it.

Developing practices and ideas that nurture these characteristics has always been part of Open/Conceptual’s fundamental purpose. That should be evident by reading a lot of what I’ve written in the past two years (especially here).

I suppose I’m “out of the closet” now. I can’t figure out how high-profile I should be about this aspect (which is itself a manifestation of a characteristic from the autistic spectrum). Regardless of how much self-disclosure I use, watch for neurodiversity to come up more often in the discussion here.

Oh, and also, why don’t you get the book and read along?

[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.]

This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual.

As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that spontaneously occurred to me after a a long period of germination. I didn’t sit down and decide “ok, I’m going to articulate the mission now,” but the connotations are nonetheless intentional and specific.

“Designing” deliberately refers to “design thinking” as practiced by the firms like IDEO and promoted by leading consultants and educators. This has been a part of Open/Conceptual’s foundational background since the start, if not earlier.

Design and design thinking, of course, have their own methodologies; roughly speaking (according to my own interpretation), they come down to a fusion of art, science, and commerce:

• Art: Aesthetics and emotions are essential; also, the process is open to spontaneous insights and inspirations.
• Science: It’s a social, reiterative process that assumes imperfection, fallibility, and continuous improvement through observation and experiments.
• Commerce: The ultimate test of merit is, “Are people willing to spend their time, attention, energy, and money on this?”

What’s missing is the Civic element…

While I don’t deny that design can improve (and has improved) things in civic and social domains, I think there are some important ways the civic sphere is inaccessible to current design methodologies — starting with the fact that design tends to be oriented around specific projects and objectives, while civics is endless; it lacks any ultimate & agreed-upon objective.

So that’s kind of where Open/Conceptual comes in: at the level of epistemology, or meta-methodology: the objective is to design an ultimate objective... keeping in mind that “design” infers that the process is reiterative — an endless succession of improving-but-still-imperfect results — i.e. we have to accept we won’t ever arrive at (or even articulate) “the” objective, but it’s the process of working it out that matters.

To put it another way, this is a philosophical enterprise: an attempt to do philosophy — not via weighty tomes full of impenetrable prose, but by modeling it into organizations and institutions that generate analogies and metaphors.

It’s kind of a microcosm for how we should try to conceive and organize the rest of our world. As I wrote last year:

Open Conceptual is where we end up by thinking creatively about everything — or at least that’s the objective. But the notion that creative thinking leads someplace is just a metaphor. We don’t really go anywhere: we grow: we cultivate creative mastery and freedom — which brings us back to the first meaning: Open Conceptual is the enterprise led foremost by creative thinking.

Exactly where it leads is impossible to know at this point, but generally, it’s the best way to go (I mean “grow”), because as long as we’re working this way, we continue to learn — we continue to stay informed and in practice so we’ll be competent and resourceful enough when genuine opportunities and challenges emerge.

In the process of summarizing my last post, Jeff Jarvis suggested I was “searching for a metaphor for what I’ve been calling beta-think.” He’s exactly right — though I wasn’t aware of it when I started writing — so I’m going to take that up with a bit more brevity and focus.

The search for a “beta-think” metaphor builds on a more fundamental one I worked out last year, when I proposed that relevance will become the key to a new theory of human motivation:

I may not have realized it at the time, but my intellectual project was being supplied by metaphors from the internet — and more importantly, from the social web, or “Web 2.0.” The old dichotomies were inspired and perpetuated by mechanical metaphors — collisions and friction, turning gears, pressurized steam, etc — so it’s perhaps inevitable for us to conceive a new theory (or at least attitude, or vocabulary) of human nature using the marquee technology of our age. [...]

So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation from domination and control to connectedness and meaning…

Google’s search engine acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.

So what’s the improved metaphor for beta-think? I don’t know yet — but I do know how we can work it out: by simply doing and making things in beta: prototyping and adapting and reiterating, etc.

By developing more open organizations and processes — based on the idea that people are motivated by relevance, not just money, power, and prestige — we’ll get progressively better metaphors and models for imagining how the mind works; as we get a better understanding of how the mind works, we can develop more effective organizations and processes… and so on, heuristically & recursively.

Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.”

That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate things by looking at how many unexpected new opportunities they generate.

Failure breaks things open and allows us to remix the pieces in different ways. If we don’t do this from time-to-time — if we just keep accumulating more mass onto the same framework — eventually it gets too bulky and falls on our heads. 

It’s like forests that don’t have enough regular little manageable fires: eventually they get too dense, the ground accumulates too much dry wood, until one spark destroys thousands of acres without anything anyone can do to stop it.

This isn’t pseudo-profound stuff. This is just how life works — life outside the boxed-in board game version we’ve imagined ourselves playing for decades.

It’s like the shift from Newton’s physics to the less intuitive models of quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity: the new ideas aren’t as neat (and in many cases aren’t as useful) but they’re more accurate… and one day they will make sense and people will wonder how we could have been so stupid — just as we wonder how people could have once believed the universe revolves around a flat Earth. 

That in itself is a good demonstration of what generativity means. Newton’s physics and calculus succeeded because it passed its DNA through generation after generation of subsequent discoveries, inventions, and ultimately a cult of efficiency that took over the world. 

But now it’s becoming more difficult to stand on Newton’s shoulders. His ideas aren’t as generative anymore; they perpetuate more than they generate. 

The technical edifice is so massive and sophisticated and dense that younger generations are having trouble seeing opportunities there. In science there isn’t much left that’s fit for Newton to explain; in engineering there’s plenty left to build, but the great challenges have already been conquered is largely gone.

The bridges and dams have been built, the moon has been conquered, the atom has already been split….

So we’ve been breaking-off Newton’s limbs and leaping away from the edifice to smash bosons, create ambient intelligence, and who-knows-what-else.

The new sciences address things that happen randomly, things that grow, things that don’t fit on the static grid: string theory, genetics, nanotech, etc.

Much of the new science — like the new economy — is not about layering subsequent successes on top of each other, but they are generative in the sense that they open up new fields to explore. They are adventures that could very likely fail to prove their original hypotheses but can’t fail to generate new ideas and insights. 

E.g. String theory might eventually prove to be a “failure” in the limited sense — I suspect because it is tethered by what our math and mental models are capable of; we need to make some kind of conceptual leap — but whatever resolves the problems will be articulated by ideas that emerged by accident in the process of adventure.

In the process of writing this I remembered an older post (that should have been imported to this blog but doesn’t seem to have made it) about failing in a good way:

I just published (and deleted) a truly stupid post. Which is fine.

This blog is all about trying things out, challenging myself to explore and define new boundaries — that I don’t quite understand yet — as opposed to beginning (and then staying) within bounds.

Some of the best things are discovered by accident, and I wouldn’t want to miss out on them.

For example, a few days ago I was picking out random books and I accidentally found one about Henry Hudson.

I’d never heard of Hudson — or so I thought — until I flipped it over and read the back. Turns out this is the guy who lent his name to the Hudson River in New York, and Hudson Bay — and thus the Hudson Bay Company, HBC, The Bay.

Yes, he found the Hudson River for the Dutch (at the site of what is now New York City), and he found Hudson Bay for the British. For these accomplishments, Henry Hudson was seen as a total failure in his time.

Hudson’s backers weren’t looking for what he eventually found — nor even where they very interested after he found them. They wanted to find a route to “the Orient.” The expidition that took him all the way to (what is now) Albany NY was supposed to travel north of Russia, to China…

That obviously didn’t go as planned.

Nor did his expidition that took him into Hudson Bay, which was also supposed to reach China, although it did manage to set up one of history’s longest commercial dynasties. That expidition — and Hudson’s life — ended in mutinous disaster.

As we explore new ideas and new ways of doing things through the web, are we emulating Columbus and Hudson by “failing good”? Are we paying enough attention to the potentially positive accidents around us? Or are we more like Hudson’s financiers, who were disappointed that he never sailed over the North Pole?

Sometimes we react to these accidental discoveries as, “Oh well, I’ll take what I can get… could’ve been worse,” but accidents are aren’t mere consolations, they are the heart of life’s most essential processes. 

Randomness and uncertainty are the keys to what we know of evolution and quantum theory so far — and, I believe we’ll soon learn, the keys to psychology and every related human science. 

After all, what motivates us? What actually compels us to do things?

It isn’t perfection, and it sure as hell isn’t efficiency.

Even looking at the people who hold perfection in high esteem, it isn’t perfection itself that motivates them, it’s the challenge of pursuing it — and the sneaking uncertainty that they can’t attain it: it’s a dare.

Then there are the discoverers, creators, and adventurers who are drawn to the unknown — or rather, to what-they-think-they-know-but-can’t-prove…

If you take the uncertainty and randomness and genuine risk out of life (as in, risking oneself, not just other people’s money) you take the life out of life…

So why would we perpetuate organizations, rules, and systems that are based on the fundamental assumption that randomness and uncertainty can be mechanized and ordered into a irrelevance? 

It’s the fatal flaw of both communism and industrial capitalism — not to mention fascism. 

As a partial aside, I worry that our response to the finance crisis — “we’re getting it under control” — is simply an extension of the same defective ideas and attitudes that set off the crisis in the first place… like smothering a fire with wood: it’s still smoldering underneath, and now we’ve adding more fuel.

We’ve got a long way to go before overcoming these defects. And how do we get there?

I don’t know — but I do know that in order to move-on we’ll need to generate a lot of new ideas and a lot of new stuff. Most of it will fail — yes, but most of the stuff we have now is failing too… at least we won’t be sitting helplessly in the midst of collapse.

Ultimately there’s no single solution — nothing we can design and plan and settle on. What saves us at critical moments is a) luck, b) an abundance of options, and c) the ability to navigate uncertain terrain…

That last is the one that’s most in our control. Like any ability, it develops through practice. Unfortunately for most, by the time you actually need it, it’ll be too late to start learning.

The society that embraces uncertainty, nurtures a love for it (i.e. a love of learning) and develops institutions that thrive because of randomness rather than despite it, will eventually have the most success, generation-by-generation.

This morning I realized I was a little unfair to Glen Pearson in my last post at BrianFrank.ca. I excerpted a bit of his blog as a jumping-off point, but the rest of my post didn’t really have much to do with what he wrote. I kind of left it hanging there as if he didn’t have any more to add to the discussion, and I didn’t do anything to show how his blog, The Parallel Parliament, is a pretty good place to start demonstrating the kind of generative articulation we need more of.

I should’ve excerpted what he wrote in his previous post:

When MPs enter the blogosphere with their demonizing rants, they often get what they deserve. And when media types attempt to sell the public on shallow controversy, they too suffer as a result. Unfortunately, such practices have, more frequently than not, put a saddening distance between the serious thinkers of both camps who would like to have meaningful discussions over the national state. So, we have arrived at the place where reflective MPs don’t blog and serious journalists won’t write on serious issues that just won’t sell. The historical healthy tension between politicians and the media has now become a debilitating arena of national distraction. Things have clearly changed and only serious dialogue, thinking and writing within these two camps can bring us back to a serious national mood. It would be interesting to see what the journalists/delegates at Charlottetown would make of all this.

I genuinely believe there will be tremendous improvements to the quality of blogosphere commentary and conversation in the next year or two as more late adopters (i.e. normal people) get on and balance things out. 

I’m even imagining (I mean, dreaming of) a day when all politicians are expected to use blogs (or whatever they’re called in the future) and social media to make their attitudes and convictions fully open, articulate, and honest. I want it to be just as standard & required in the future as conventions and fundraisers [and staged debates] are today. 

We need to see exactly where people’s ideas come from. As it is now, I’m not sure too many people know where their own ideas come from. Leaders should be compelled to make a more rigorous account of what they’re supposedly promoting — both in campaigns, and while in office.

There’s a saying that “daylight is the best disinfectant.” By making things more transparent and accountable (I’m talking about more than just money) — open to scrutiny by anyone, i.e. on the web where everything is findable, and forever — the people who have the most to hide (incopetence, sketchy motives) will struggle the most.

Some will argue that the critics and commenters might have sketchy motives too — well I’m sure a lot of them do, but everything they do is open to scrutiny as well. The ones who are just trolling to undermine the discussion won’t get any traction on the mature web.

Now that the web has become an essential part of our political system and our daily lives, most people online don’t have any time to waste on snickering, sneering, and snark. People ultimately want quality — if it’s available. Attention, popularity, and authority will gravitate to those who provide the most relevant and generative value for people. 

With a little work, the good guys & gals will win in the end — regardless of which party they represent.

Just sort of a brainstorm here, following up on some of my relatively more youthful attempts to outline what this is all about:

• Draft Enterprise Model
• The Practice of Theory

The other day I jotted down a few points — trying to distill the underlying mission of this amorphous enterprise. It has a few different aims. I’m doing this one first because it’s the most relevant and the easiest to explain.

Make decision-making processes more open and objective, specifically through digital media.

This means advocating and educating people to bring all of our discussions and arguments and negotiations online to make them more

• articulate
• defined
• accountable
• machine readable
• measurable
• transparent
• organized
• scalable
• searchable
• reverse-engineerable
• replicable
• repeatable 
• testable
• correctable
• extensible
• replaceable
• dynamic
• self-organizing
• generative
• sustained
• effective
• adaptable

I’m sure there are a lot more characteristics we could add to that list. The gist is that the web gives us tools to make our political and moral and business discussions a lot more open and objective, like science.

One important mindset-change we’ll need to make is to remember that all of our institutions, policies, programs, and ideas are works in progress. Business leaders like Roger Martin and Tim Brown call this design thinking.

Instead of reacting to crises by panicking and throwing around blame (or conversely, getting defensive), we need to start looking at our failures and crises (and successes) as evidence — information for us to build on, like the kind observed in science — to demonstrate how our policies and practices are performing. 

We shouldn’t be surprised by crises. We should be watching for them the way geneticists watch for mutations, or the way programmers watch for bugs.

More importantly, we need to learn the habit of hypothesizing and anticipating specific outcomes.

Whenever we “solve” a problem, or make any kind of decision, we shouldn’t just say, “There’s that problem solved” and forget about it. Solutions are actually beta models that need to be followed-up on and assessed. We need to actively watch the results to see how the solution is performing — and not be surprised or defensive when it performs poorly — and make adjustments accordingly.

So the decision-making process needs to involve just as much predicting as planning. Instead of simply saying, “we’ll implement A and then B, and finally C,” we should frame it as, “we’ll see how A performs; if x occurs then we’ll implement to B, if y occurs then we’ll implement B2… and if z occurs then we might have to go back and change A to A2…” etc.

That’s why decision-making needs to be fully documented and digitized and opened up: monitoring and assessing and adjusting to performance is a big, big process — far too big for any old-fashioned, top-down organization that existed before the web.

Fortunately there are plenty of skilled, passionate, and knowledgeable people around who would do that work voluntarily… not merely out of a sense of duty (though that may be part of it), but because it’s a fulfilling challenge — a way to feel relevant, responsible, and respectable — as well as being a great opportunity to learn and work with complementary people.

The reason people don’t do more of this kind of voluntary work now is the whole system conspires to discourage it. Even within an organization: projects are divided and tasks are cordoned-off to specific people; nobody wants to step on toes (or have their toes stepped on) so people stay silent about obvious problems and opportunities; people guard their own little areas of responsibility to ensure coworkers and up-and-comers don’t undermine them, or make their job redundant.

But in politics and civics, participation is already encouraged, right?

Sure, but mainly the kind that reinforces an established player’s authority. Too many volunteers are still expected to be deferent and grateful for being bestowed with the opportunity. And the people assigning tasks don’t know what exactly everyone has to offer; knowledge and energy are wasted. 

The only person who knows what one is capable of, creatively, is oneself (albeit with a little mentoring and nudging-along). Further, we don’t know exactly how we’re best able to contribute, creatively, until we actually start interacting and learning within the task.

You can’t plan where all of the best contributions will come from. A large part of what motivates us to get involved is that it’s an opportunity to find out exactly what we can do…

This whole transformation is going to require not just learning new practices and attitudes; it’s going to require substantial sacrifices in the short-term (and “short-term” in my scale can stretch to span a generation). A lot of organizations and people will have to give up some of their authority, influence, and competitive advantage — which they maintain by keeping things closed-off and under wraps. 

This movement is very bad news for anyone used to playing at politics and business like a card game in which the object is to get as much as you can while preventing your competitors from getting anything, whether that means market share, information, whatever.

That cut-throat style worked for a time but that time is coming to an end. The web is naturally tilting the table towards greater openness. The game is changing whether we like it or not. Competitive advantage is increasingly going to the most nimble and adaptive, not the most robust and fortified. 

More importantly, changing the game is in everyone’s best interest in the long-term. Considering the magnitude of power at mankind’s disposal, and the potential for tremendous harm that can occur when that power is concentrated around too-few decision-makers, we need everyone to be involved in the process of making decisions, and we need it all to be accounted for.

To get an idea of what I mean by making it “accountable,” see Jeff Jarvis’s last post on metadata for news.  

As these processes become more developed, as everyone becomes their own publicist, we’ll start to get a better sense of how journalists can benefit by uploading much of their work to people and organizations themselves. We’ll increasingly expect organizations and institutions (and anyone “important” — or anyone who aspires to be) to syndicate everything about themselves into information feeds.

(If you’re worried about honesty, I expect that as our cultural expectations evolve towards openness, attempts to hide or withhold information will become taboo to the point of ruining those who are caught. The risks will be too great — or at least that’s what we should aim for.) 

Journalists will specialize more in selecting from that, editing, scrutinizing and checking it, adding commentary, and turning it into stories.

Meanwhile, politicians and businesses can benefit because much of their thinking and decision-making will be downloaded to journalists and on to the general public. For example, what’s the point of polling and running focus groups when you’re already getting both quantified and qualitative feedback in real-time?

I realize this picture is fairly idealistic at this point, but that’s why I titled it an aim. And don’t forget it’s still in beta. I’m still in the process of deciding and discovering exactly how these ideas might work…

David Eaves did something awesome. I didn’t clue into this possibility when I blogged about Umair Haque’s Generation M Manifesto. He literally remixed and edited it.

I was inspired to start editing it myself but found I wanted to change too much — not that I disagreed with the spirit of the thing (which I agree with almost too-passionately) but because I have my own perspective, with my own specialized vocabulary, which I use to address the issues that I’m in the best position to understand and affect. Accordingly, I’m inclined to frame it in rather different terms.

But the last thing I’d want to do is oppose or contradict what Haque and Eaves or the rest of the best are saying.

It shouldn’t be a tug-of-war over terminology and semantics. That’s the old way of doing things — what Generation M is supposed to overcome. 

But, nor can we merely “agree to disagree.” We have to keep the dialog open and alive.

What these conversations and debates do, which we need to ensure they continue doing, is generate familiarity & orientation, adaptation & integration.

The notion of Familiarity replaces the notion of categorization. Instead of silos we have networks of relations. Instead of neatly arranging everything (and everybody) into discrete slots, we need to appreciate things for the various traits they share with this-and that — and, ultimately, their individual character.

Orientation replaces the overconfident notion that we actually know where everything is and where we’re going. We can’t plan everything. We will go off the road from time to time (maybe because the road gets washed-out or collapsed, maybe because we see better opportunities in previously untravelled & unexplored areas), so it’s better to have the ability to re-orient ourselves in changing environments. 

I’ll leave Adaptation and Integration with you… and there are a lot more notions to explore…

What it comes down to is that this is really an anti-manifesto kind of movement. It’s about the process — whether it’s the process of remixing or sharing or debating… — not anything that could be laid out comprehensively in absolute terms.

Put simply, it isn’t about the document, it’s about the dialog.

At the same time, we need documents and draft manifestos as platforms or frameworks and references for dialog. Discussing things like this is the best way to exercise our minds, voices, and vocabularies; to generate familiarity and rapport with others; to understand their ideas and appreciate their perspectives.

… as long as they keep our conversations and adventures alive.

I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome.

The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve:

One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, and member of the class of 1939. In his book InRetrospect reflecting on the war, he wrote that while at Harvard he had developed “an approach to organizing human activities.” There were three steps: “Define a clear objective…develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan.” This was still the essence of the HBS method. Strategy, planning and measurement. Of course, McNamara’s methods came to seem macabre when he applied it to counting bodies in Vietnam.

[If you haven't seen The Fog of War yet, you should.]

Broughton goes on in his post to suggest “the McNamara Syndrome persists at Harvard Business School and more widely among business and economic leaders. It consists of three very dangerous elements”:

1)       Excessive faith in systems, long-established networks, language, thinking and a set of assumptions which change more quickly than you do… 

2)       An over-justified confidence in one’s methods, instilled by schools and prior success… 

3)       Brilliant people often end up working and thinking inside a bubble. Inhabitants of this bubble reinforce each other’s behavior, assuming it to be all equally brilliant…

Any of this seem familiar?

In today’s economy, the goal of increased home ownership, fine, became the mortgage meltdown and the creation of far too many credit derivatives.

What really caught my attention was 

In McNamara’s case, he assumed that what worked at HBS, Stanford and Ford would work at the DoD. This is the subject of Halberstam’s brilliant and tragic book The Best and the Brightest, about McNamara and the other men around JFK. The financial collapse is The Best and the Brightest replayed in the economic sphere, though stripped of the public service ethic in Kennedy’s generation.

That highlighted part (my emphasis) represents one of my most persistent complaints.

“The best and the brightest” in our society owe their success to a rigorous sort of disposition that is reinforced from a very early age. In turn, they continue to refine our institutions and conventions towards those values. 

Our whole system of education and career advancement is set up to promote people who thrive within established frameworks, where there are “right and wrong answers,” competing to win zero-sum games in closed, rule-directed systems, with clear “winners and losers.”

The lessons learned along the way — from classroom to sandlot, continuing on through graduate school, carrying over to the negotiating table, board room, golf course, etc — aren’t easily unlearned when people find themselves facing big, ambiguous, complex challenges that require the reticence to dwell in uncertainty, adaptiveness, humility to give up on goals and plans that turn out to be misdirected, and the creativeness to develop new frameworks.

Instead, the best and the brightest — so used to winning and being right (not to mention being recognized and rewarded for it) — have interpreted the open and dynamic systems they face at the highest levels in the real world as being like the simpler challenges, in closed systems, they had dominated all their lives.

The more I think and write about it, the more I believe that much of the past century was an experiment — an attempt by mankind to control everything with machines, mathematics, and rigid management regimes — which eventually failed.

According to current assumptions about success (i.e. our need for certainty and confirmation), that’s supposed to be bad news.

But if we start to bury those arrogant ideals and look at the world more openly, as we ought to — as an inherently uncertain process, beyond our ability to control completely — then the realization that the 20th century was an experiment, is, in fact invigorating…

Our response to the ongoing collapse of the old models should be, “Look at how much we’ve learned!”

And look at all of the opportunity…

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Blogs has written a Generation M Manifesto, which begins:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

I understand that previous generations have made similar complaints in the past, when they were young. I’m inclined to think that the big difference between today’s radical sentiments vs, say, the 1960’s, is how much of a technical advantage we have. Not only do we know how to program DVD players and tweak security settings on Facebook, but we are also using that technical advantage to advance our theoretical knowledge.

So it isn’t like we simply have a different perspective. Some of us can make pretty serious, objective cases when we argue [as Haque goes on]: 

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

And no, this isn’t just a reactionary youth movement. We’ve already got a stacked roster of role models who have either carved a niche or dynamited their presence into the heart of the old landscape:

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. [...]

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

I find myself starting to get a more radical edge.

This is not comfortable for me. In the past I’ve been fairly conservative by nature, but these points just seem increasingly obvious to me. Where does this lead?

Won’t lie.

When you package seminal books in a design-conscious concept, I turn into a total sucker.

The latest set to catch my eye is the Penguin Magnum Collection (just a UK & Australia thing?), featuring six narrative non-fiction classics updated with iconic cover photos. [via CR via BMD]

A couple of them are on my to-read radar (not exactly on my to-read list). If I saw these seven or eight years ago I might’ve given into the craving to buy; I’d have those barcoded spines planted on my bookshelf, looking at me every day, reminding me of my transaction.

I’m glad I’ve outgrown that impulse.

But now I have a new impulse: making this stuff…