James' Travels

Television and The Cognitive Surplus

2009-05-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back I finally pulled the plug on television. Since I don't own a television, this meant not visiting hulu.com any more. Since then I've noticed some extra time in my life that I'm not used to using, that has long been consumed by passive consumption.

Here Clay Shirky talks about the vast 'cognitive surplus' that our society has, the free time that we don't yet know what to do with and generally spend on things like television, and how social media like Wikipedia are beginning to tap into it.

My favorite stats from his talk: The entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. Americans alone watch 200 BILLION hours of television per year. That's 200,000,000,000 hours. Or 2,000 Wikipedias per year.

If people spend 1% of that television time do something productive, that's 20 Wikipedias per year. And this year we're going to sprinkle in a WikiChoice.

(ht @gapingvoid)

The Haps

2009-05-16T01:22:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update for those who would like it.

- I've been working with some friends to create WikiChoice.com, a platform for people to align their purchasing power with their deepest values. This thing has huge potential. We're just rolling out the first, skeletal iteration of the site. And we need your help. Hit the link above to check it out.

- There's a short piece of my writing up at the Ecclesia Collective site right now. It's a reflection on the American Christian church, and though it is critical, I hope readers will realize its "both-and" message and see it as an encouragement at least as much as a rebuke.

Anti-Consumerist Consumers

2009-05-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

Simple Shoes, a for-profit company that sells shoes to consumers, just put out a manifesto against consumerism. In order to sell more shoes.

Are they sincere in their sentiments? Sure. But the duplicity is inescapable. You can't market against consumerism. So why do we as consumers buy in? I think it has to do with Social Object theory (a la Hugh Macleod). People need something physical to rally around; we need atoms to show and share and talk about. We need things to help us remember and to show others what we believe, who we are. And the only ones offering these Social Objects right now are consumer products companies.

Simple Shoes wants people who are sick of consumerism to buy Simple Shoes, and to show them to their friends as proof that they're sick of consumerism, so that their friends will buy Simple Shoes, too. It's not malicious, it's just mixed intentions -- you can't be an anti-consumerist consumer products company.

But anti-consumerism is important and needs a voice. It needs a Social Object for believers to rally around, to identify each other by and amplify the conversations. It needs something they don't have to buy. First thoughts on what this can be? An open source design, a distinctive icon, that can be made from things found in common household, no purchase necessary, easily disseminated through virtually free electronic media. People should be encouraged to make one for themselves, make many for their friends, have parties to make them, give them away freely.

Will be meeting with designers, artists, dreamers about this. Anyone want in?

Acholi Beads Glimpse: Stepping Stones

2009-04-17T10:34:00.000-07:00

Acholi Beads Glimpse: Stepping Stones from James Pearson on Vimeo.

The beginning of the Acholi Beads story. Our Ugandan partners had their lives upended by Africa's longest running war. See their backbreaking work in the stone quarry, and watch their eyes light up as our partnership gives them hope for a better life. For more info visit http://acholibeads.com

24-Hour WikiChoice Tagline Contest!

2009-03-19T13:56:00.000-07:00

[Update: Hit up the WikiChoice blog to see the winners!]

WikiChoice is coming right along, and in the spirit of community we've decided to open up a contest to crowdsource taglines! We're looking for something short, inspiring, and focussed on the WikiChoice mission.

The best so far: "Postive choices for a world of impact" from Charles.

Can you do better? Leave a comment here, or at the new WikiChoice blog.

Socially Proactive Business, noun

2009-03-13T23:31:00.000-07:00

Socially Proactive Business, noun: A business whose success is directly and inextricably tied to the alleviation of a social ill, and/or the continued improvement of that societal cirumstance.

Sample Usage: As more and more customers buy jewelry from the Socially Proactive Business "Acholi Beads", the company has to buy more beads from war affected women in Uganda at fair trade prices, so more families escape poverty.

Origin: Coined right here on this blog. See here.

10,000 Hours of Love

2009-03-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

I just downloaded the audio version of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers. I haven't listened to it yet but from what I've heard much of it centers upon research done at Florida State which suggests that thousands of hours of deliberate practice are needed to become an expert in any complex field, whether you're a cellist or a neurosurgeon. This has become known as the 10,000 Hour Rule.

Gladwell says that the best practicioners in any cognitively difficult field have one thing in common - they put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become the best. That comes out to about 3 hours per day for 10 years, skipping practice maybe every other Sunday. It got me thinking about what I want to be the best in the world at, and how little I practice these things.

When I held this principle up to my spiritual pursuits I saw something very clearly, something I believe is worth sharing. I deeply value the teachings of Jesus, and he once was challenged to choose which of God's commandments was the greatest. His answer:

'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'

What if I practice Jesus' greatest commandments for 10,000 hours? What if I deliberately focus on loving God and caring for my neighbor the way I do for myself for three hours every day? Who would I be if I became one of the best in the world at Love?

And better yet, what if thousands of us practice loving our neighbors as ourselves three hours per day for 10 years? What would our neighborhoods look like then? Or our citis? Our countries? How might the world change if we all became experts at Love?

It's worth a try.

A war between limits and wonder.

2009-03-08T03:14:00.000-07:00

Make My Birthday Happy in Nepal

2009-03-03T02:44:00.000-08:00

Hi Friends,

It's my Birthday. I'm 27. I've got a bunch of great friends, a solid roof, and a comfy bed. I don't need much.

But I have friends who could use a gift. All they ask is $1 per month. And what can they do with $1 per month? They can put long distance wireless computer networks all over Himalayan Nepal. Seriously. I've been there; I've Skyped from 13,000 ft. It's amazing.

And the things the internet does for communication in villages that are 3 days' hike from the nearest dirt road, the things it does for medicine, for education! And education is the key. It's transformative.

Please go here: http://bit.ly/7jhvG and give them $12 for the 12 months my 27th year if you can. Any amount is great, though.

Many Thanks,
James

PS - if you decide to donate, feel free to leave a comment below and let me know. I'll be excited. That's a good birthday present.

Three Principles of Ethical Economics

2009-03-01T23:14:00.000-08:00

As I prepared for my recent 'Discipleship Economics' workshop I tried to strain some foundational principles out of my swirl of thoughts about personal economics grounded in personal values. So far I have come up with Three Principles of Personal Economics that I hope you'll find as valuable as I have. They are all based on what I call the Transcendent Virtue: Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

1) Simplicity - Free your time, commitment, and money by limiting your personal needs and meeting them with a minimum of resources. If we ought to care for our neighbors as we do ourselves, it stands to reason that our personal economics must leave room for our neighbors. This begins with limiting how much of our resources are devoted to our own needs.

2) Generosity - Simplicity without generosity is only stinginess or laziness. If a need can be filled by giving your Time or your Commitment, that is probably the best way. Give money as an act of relationship, not in lieu of it. Money is best given within established, ongoing relationships. Generosity should be proactive: Set aside time, commitment, and money; seek out great ways to use them. The results might amaze you.

3) Ethicality - Even as you simplify your lifestyle you will continue to buy things. Many products are made using substandard ethical or environmental practices. Make a serious effort to buy only the most ethically and environmentally sound products. Remember, your neighbor is anyone that you have the opportunity to care for, and each time you make a purchase, you have the opportunity to care for the people behind your product.

(The difficulty in finding this information is why my friends and I are building WikiChoice, a web service that will give you instant access to the best consumer choices. Follow us on Twitter here.)

WikiChoice Wins Best Idea!

2009-03-01T22:22:00.001-08:00

Two ideas from our little Creative Action Group were chosen for the top 3 ideas of The Idea Camp conference in Irvine, CA this weekend - Bake It Forward and WikiChoice. And WikiChoice was chosen as the best idea of the conference!

The video below starts with Emily pitching Bake It Forward, then there's a pitch to put non-profit logos on band-aids, then at 4:10 you can watch me pitch WikiChoice. Enjoy.

The Idea Camp Competition - Top 3 from Jonathan Chan on Vimeo.

The Ethical Imperative

2009-02-26T23:41:00.000-08:00

[Last minute post before the Idea Camp tomorrow. These topics are fascinating. I can't wait for the discussion]

Economics has lately been on most people's minds, and perhaps on mine more than some. Instead of the national and international economics favored by the evening news, I've been focused on personal economics - the economic decisions of individuals and families.

As I mentioned in my last post, my views on personal economics grow in the soil of my values, and the greatest value, as I see it, is the golden rule in its most positive form - love your neighbor as you love yourself. That is: give another person's needs the same consideration as your own.

It follows, then, that our personal economics must make room for other people's needs. But my observation of the American lifestyle shows me that we have trouble making room for ourselves. We carry bulging budgets, heavy with debt, obligation, and entitlement, unable to bear the weight of an outside request.

In my case, and in yours if you agree with me that empathetic love is a high value, a personal economic imperative has become clear: Simplicity.

As I prepared to write this I first tried to define for myself what the term Simplicity meant in regards to my personal economics. I have used it to describe what sort of house I wanted to live in, how many hours I wanted to work, even how many pots and pans I wanted to own. So it was hard to pin down a definition, but I think I've come close.

"Simplicity is the freeing up of your time, commitment, and money by limiting your personal needs and meeting them with a minimum of resources."

The importance is obvious - by using less of your resources on yourself, you have more to invest in others, in your neighbors as it were.

The practical ramifications of this sort of Simplicity are as difficult as they are obvious, especially for American accustomed to a self-serving consumer culture. Here are a few examples, I'm sure you can add many more:

Don't live in the most expensive house you can afford. Choose the least expensive house that meets your needs.
Don't trade in your used car just because the sexy new coupe is out. If it runs, keep it.
Share and borrow things like power tools, sports equipment, even cars and computers if you can.
Stay out of consumer debt.
Eat out less.
Make your own entertainment instead of buying it.
Rethink excessive holiday gift giving.

The list could go on. I'd love to hear your ideas on Simplicity! Now to bed. Big day tomorrow.

Personal Economics Gone Interpersonal

2009-02-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

As I've been working through more thoughts related to economics, I've realized that my values have deeply shaped my economic opinions, like a place's climate gives rise to its crops. So I feel that it's fair at the outset to tell you that I believe humanity's highest virtue is this: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Call it loving your neighbor, call it transcending the self, call it lovingkindness, empathy, mirror neurology; call it whatever you like. In my opinion, our ability as humans to place the needs of another person on the same level of importance and priority as our own is our highest calling.

My ideas about personal economics grow in this soil.

Posts to come include thoughts on simplicity, ethical economics, generosity, and perhaps more. Looking forward to a continued conversation.

Economics 101: Money, John Maynard Keynes, and Monty Python

2009-02-13T00:11:00.000-08:00

In a couple weeks I'll be at the Idea Camp (you should come; it's free) facilitating a discussion about money. Now, as a caveat, it's worth saying that I don't have any right now. But what I do have are some hard-earned ideas about money, about our culture's relationship to money, and what we might do well to change about that relationship.

Over the next couple weeks I'll be working out some thoughts on this blog, so please feel free to join in the discussion and help me refine my understandings. For starters, a quick foundational discussion of values and economics.

Economics, more than being about money, is about how people make decisions. It's about how we decide what to invest our resources in -- our time, our money, our commitment, etc. The most influential economist of the last century, John Maynard Keynes, went further than to study and describe decision making, he prescribed it:

"For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

The foulness of which he writes is the love of money, a vice known to many as the root of all kinds of evil. Keynes prescribes a subjugation of values such as generosity to this vice for at least 100 years, after which he says society will have become so rich as to throw off such "psuedo-morals" and see "the money-motive at its true value ... a somewhat disgusting morbidity."

Keynesian policy prescription became the basis for much economic thought and policy, including Roosevelt's New Deal. I believe his moral prescription has shaped our country as well.

When John Cleese (of Monty Python fame) first came to America, he says he was struck by the unabashed pursuit of excessive wealth. The British at the time were more reserved about money, he recalls, most being satisfied with a comfortable salary for an honest day's work. But not the Americans.

Keynes' prescription has been realized, with restraint and generosity being caged to let avarice and precaution work their dark magic on our economy. What Keynes did not realize, though, is that decades of economic wizardry would see several generations brought up seeing fair treated as foul and foul as fair, seeing excess praised over simplicity and selfishness rationalized as economical. His prescription for economic growth was also one for risky cultural engineering. As Shumacher asked, How can a system founded on greed ever lead to peace?

And Keynes also seems to have failed to ask the question, Where is the rich man who says, 'I have enough'? He is rare, and often so rich as to be statistically invisible. Bill Gates might fall into this category, and perhaps Buffet and his peers, though he keeps investing. But the millionaire down the street has not stopped his pursuit of wealth, though he lives like the kings of not long ago. I myself hover around the 90th percentile in world income, but I haven't found that financial peace of mind that Keynes promised.

My economic thoughts will buck Keynes and subjugate macroeconomic concerns to personal and (I'm stretching here) universal values. Where Keynes believed that economic development would solve the values problem, I suspect that values will guide us to a more sustainable economy.

Recovering Christmas

2008-12-24T22:34:00.000-08:00

A Yuletide Retrospective

I always loved Christmas. As a child I would crawl into bed with a tense and churning stomach each Christmas Eve in anticipation of the joyous bounty the morning was sure to bring. And Santa never disappointed. The month following would consist of discussions like poker games with friends - I'll see your He-Man sword and raise you a Robotic T-Rex. The victor, in this case, already had the spoils.

It did not strike me until much later what an irony those mornings were. My family, and a host of families like mine, was clear that Christmas was to be a celebration of Jesus - a Jewish craftsman who chose a life of wandering poverty and charity. Looking back it seems at very best a thin, shaky connection between our seasonal excess and this historical man who embraced poverty as a lifestyle, perhaps an ethic.

It took several trips to poor parts of the world to wake me to our cultural doublethink, and since then Christmas has held a fair amount of ambivalence for me as I watch many people disregard Jesus' values to celebrate his birth. But this year I believe we have the opportunity to change.

Santa's Got A Whole New Bag

The anthem of change has been lifted from campaign events on all sides of the political roundtable - a soundtrack to the presidential election. The economic meltdown has sent our leaders scrambling to develop changes that will refound us on solid ground. We have reached a point in our nation's history at which the need for cultural change has become widely evident.

The Christmas season began with a retail blitz, as it does each year, on the day after Thanksgiving - Black Friday. The name itself is unsettling. And this year's melee held an even darker omen - as the first WalMarts on the east coast opened, a temporary security guard at a New York WalMart was trampled to death by shoppers made inhuman by their hunger for bargains. Since then it has become clear that this Christmas is de facto different. People are uneasy riding atop this tumultuous economy and have held their purses and wallets more closely than recent years. It's a change we can build on.

One Vision For A New Christmas

Jesus' teachings were largely about love - of God, of neighbors, of enemies - about what this love looked like in the context of a life, and what a kingdom founded upon love might look like. In celebrating his birth we celebrate his life, his teachings, his purpose. Giving needless gifts to our friends and family in this context is non sequitur. It reminds me of a quote I heard from a famous Jazz musician: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Giving video games for Jesus is like killing ants for Buddha.

Here's one idea for a Christmas that would honor Jesus. Throughout the year, as you engage in and experience acts of love, the type of love that Jesus taught, write them down, journal them, blog them, remember them somehow. Then, as Christmas approaches, plan a way to share them with your friends and family. Write a story or a song, make ornaments that honor them and tell their stories as you hang them, have a time of sharing these stories over Christmas dinner, and remember together how Jesus' life influenced yours. Invite the other people involved in these stories to Christmas celebrations. Join together in marvelling at how a first century Jewish man could have such a profound impact.

And perhaps plan an act of love to carry out on or near Christmas. Use the money that would have gone to unneeded presents and meet a need that is deeply and truly felt by someone you know, or someone you could know.

If you are committed to celebrating Jesus during Christmas, give it some thought. I can't wait to hear what you come up with.

Merry Christmas.

To Be Human

2008-12-14T22:50:00.001-08:00

To be human is a terrifically confusing endeavor.

The Idea Camp

2008-12-05T22:40:00.000-08:00

Lately I've been starting things. Acholi Beads, WikiChoice, the Children's Book Project - things that didn't exist until I played some role in creating them.

This has been a strange experience.

I was never a 'start things' sort of person. In fact, I have long looked with a fair amount of envy at people with that magic for making something new, for envisioning and executing. So my recent exploration of creation has given me a chance to study from the inside what I've long watched from the sidelines. I still feel like quite a novice.

This is one of the reasons I'm excited to be at The Idea Camp in February of this coming year. This new conference/roundtable aims to bring together social innovators - people with the knack for coming up with new, important ideas and making them into world changing realities. I stand to learn a ton.

Another reason I'm excited is to reconnect with Charles Lee, The Idea Camp's organizer, who I met briefly this summer in North Carolina. Charles is using ideas of open source activism to move people from complacency to compassion, and from compassion to proactivity. I draw a lot of inspiration and guidance from his work.

Another reason I'm excited is because you're invited. The Idea Camp is February 27 and 28, 2009 in Irvine, CA, and it's free. Follow the links and register on the website and you're in. And drop me a comment if you plan to come. I'll look forward to seeing you there.

Acholi Beads: The New Luxury

2008-12-02T00:08:00.000-08:00

I just posted some thoughts over at the Acholi Beads blog about The New Luxury. A quick excerpt is below; go here for the full post.

The New Luxury acknowledges that value cannot be bought, but that we can buy based on values. It asserts that meaning is broader than a slogan, more attractive than a photo, and deeper than any pockets. It assures us that beauty created in a studio pales when compared to the faintest reflection of real love. And the new luxury insists that we will not be blinded by advertisements or manipulated by marketing; we are too smart and passionate to allow our dollars to be tempted away by false promises of happiness.

TOMORROW: an experiment

2008-11-26T00:40:00.000-08:00

A Past Quickly Gone

For thousands of years people farmed as much land as they and their families could acquire and manage. Acres and acres, but small by today's standards of industrial farms. They plowed, planted, tended and harvested. Over and over. Every season. Perhaps they had livestock as well, and knew which part of the year their herds would mate, and when the young would be born. Every year.

Before that they hunted for their food and found wild, edible plants. Food was a daily struggle and a daily accomplishment. Each day brought new hunger and new satisfaction. Perhaps some plants would last a week, maybe two, but planning ahead was of little use. Those that survived had to focus on their present.

Those days were simple. Minimal planning, some hard work, and your family would eat. And that was, for the vast majority, the best that could be done. For thousands upon thousands of years the human species has lived this simple, predictable life. But today something new is happening. It started with the Industrial Revolution and was accelerated by World War II. Suddenly we could do better than eating. Suddenly we could have comfort, even luxury. And we got them through a manufacturing boom.

Coal and oil provided cheap power, and technology improved upon itself at a surprising rate. Long distance freight leveraged these two advances and suddenly the whole world's resources were at the fingertips of those with the aptitude to take them. And the resources proved more abundant than we could have hoped. Manufacturing soared.

Like Grabbing a Passing Rocket

Fast forward to today.

In the last sixty years we have used more of the earth's resources than in all of human history before that. If you can spare a moment, please read that again. Things are so different now that we use in one year what used to take thousands of years to deplete. And the pace of our resource consumption is increasing.

Our lives look very different now, and nowhere more different then in how we interact with the planet. We are separated from the earth in every way possible. We pave it over and dam it up. We filter it and gate it off. We don't grow, hunt, harvest, or gather anything from the earth. We get it from the store.

But for the first time in the history of our species we are having a lasting impact on the earth as a whole, and it's not a good one. Deforestation, strip mining, species extinction, and polluted air and water are some of the signs of our impact. Other more controversial consequences of our collective lifestyle like global warming seem more probable each day. And most of these have become serious problems in the same 60 years during which we've drained our world's resources.

As we pull back and see this picture as a whole - the long, steady ascent through stone, bronze, and iron ages, all conducted with relatively little impact on the planet as a whole; then the short, frenetic burst of the last 200 years, and the staggering trajectory of the last 60 years - we start to see a compelling picture. The pace of change is like going for a long jog and then grabbing hold of a passing rocket.

If that long, steady ascent was a line the length of a football field, whose height represents the use of resources, it would slowly, from one goal line to the other, rise to about a foot off the ground. The last sixty years is so small in comparison to human history that it would not reach a single inch into the end zone, but our resource consumption is so rapid it would soar a mile into the sky! Being able to visualize history in this way, and to see the staggering ways we're changing our own lives and the environments around us in such a short time, leads me to a rather unnerving conclusion.

A Triple Blind Experiment

In the scope of history, our current way of life is no more than an experiment - one that might succeed, but might fail. The unnerving part is that almost no one is thinking about it this way. Instead we are reshaping the world and our interaction with it such that we depend on the success of the experiment for our survival. It seems that we are all running as rats in the maze and no one has stood up to act as scientist.

There is, I believe, reason for such myopia. Humans are not built for the long view. The many millennia of seasonal and annual repetition selected for those people who were able to focus their attention best on the short term. Hunt today, plant tomorrow, harvest in the summer. There was little thought of next year, none of next century.

But now as a race of hunters, gatherers and farmers we are facing problems of centuries. Resource depletion, environmental destruction, even national debts are not problems that the changing of the seasons will solve, but we seem to keep waiting for them to just go away, like the snow in spring.

I am not suggesting the imminent doom of mankind. I believe as much as anyone in our ability to learn and adapt. What I am suggesting is that this is a new epoch in which a more focused vision for what we must learn and how we must adapt is needed, because the world is changing a thousand times faster than it ever has.

We are building Western society on a hypothesis. That hypothesis is that all of this cataclysmic change in the ways we live and how we use the precious resources we have will be sustainable: for the next generation, for their children, and beyond. We seem to assume that since it has worked for the last sixty years, it will work for the next thousand. But there are precious few if any voices that are able to tell us if our gamble is paying off, if the experiment is working. Or not.

The 10,000 Year Clock

Two days ago I watched a TEDtalk by Stewart Brand. He showed a project that he and some friends are working on: a clock that will run for 10,000 years. The clock is a project of The Long Now Foundation, a non-profit designed to encourage long-term thinking, and when it is done it will ring a different tune with its 10 bells every day for 10,000 years.

They chose 10,000 years because it's "about how long humans have had a stable climate and technological progression." They start by looking to the past because we can see it - there are books and pictures and artifacts. But then they did the brave and difficult thing of engaging with the future. They dared to ask what the world might be like in 10,000 years, and if they could build something to survive the interim. And now they are building it.

The execution of the project is astounding; it captured my imagination for the last two days. They are building a monument-sized clock that uses only bronze-age materials - the world's largest binary computer - and embedding it inside a mountain in Nevada. They are making it into a site of pilgrimage, trying to inspire people to think 10,000 years ahead, or at least a couple hundred. In shaping the experience, one of the designers outlined the "7 Stages of a Mythic Journey" and they are creating the journey with myth in mind. It's a broad, synthetic, creative, idealistic endeavor, and I'm all for it.

Voices from 29,000 ft, and Beyond

The 10,000 year clock and The Long Now Foundation reminded me of something I've been thinking about for the last year or so. We need someone, a number of people, to monitor the experiment that is modern Western society. The difficulty is that the experiment is not happening in one university, or one field of study, or on one continent. The experiment is messy amalgamation of millions of different players and ideas, building upon each other in real time on all sides of the globe.

What we need is a new field of study that is purely synthetic - a discipline that is a mixing pot for all other disciplines, so that they might be stirred together and the temperature of the whole can be taken. This is the one that must guide us.

Bristish Economist E. F. Schumacher, in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, argues that society has become far too dependent on Economics for guidance, bowing before the almighty dollar in hopes that if everyone acts selfishly, everyone will gain and eventually find comfort, and then, peace. But he states rather intuitively that no system built upon greed will ever lead to peace, for where is the rich man who says, 'I have enough'?

Schumacher also critiques education, stating that we have built institutions that teach us the tools to create anything, but fail to teach the values that ought to guide creation. This, I think, gets to the point. There is no vision for societal progress, only a thousands mashups of technological innovations, all drawing from and competing for the limited resources of the world.

With our newfound ability to affect the world as a whole, there must be some attempt at synthetic vision and guidance. It must take into account human need and equality, enviornmental sustainability, resource renewability, economics, politics, faith and religion, even, as the 10,000-year clock shows, storytelling and myth. It's practitioners must take a higher, broader view of the world, standing as if on Everest's 29,000 ft. peak, looking out across the whole of the world. And they must look at the long-term, understanding that we do care about the longevity of our planet and its eventual sustenance of our children and their children and beyond, though often we don't think, act, or even vote that way.

In Herman Hesse's Demian the title character talks about the changing of the age, saying that most people will not be ready for the tumult. But that some will step forward, selected by the chance of nature, "Not as leaders and lawgivers - we won't be there to see the new laws - but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may need them."

The age is certainly changing, and we need those few that nature has endowed with the unique ability to see the long view. These voices must be cultivated and amplified, speaking from their lofty perspective to guide us in this grand experiment.

Products Have a History

2008-11-20T10:27:00.000-08:00

I just posted some thoughts over at the Acholi Beads blog. All my work concerning ethical consumerism lately has led me to realize that we as a society ignore the most basic facts about what we buy - who made them, where they came from. I'm working on remembering and convincing others to remember that products have a history. From my Acholi Beads post:

"It seems unnecessary to say ‘things come from somewhere,’ but I think that we as a society are quickly forgetting this. We fail to realize when standing before our next purchase that it was made somewhere, by a person, or even many people, and that often it was shipped thousands of miles to be there in front of us.
"Products have a history. And I believe that this history is more important than what the TV ads say about a product."

Read the rest here.

Acholi Beads hearts Xavisys

2008-11-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

Acholi Beads just launched a new website and online store. I've never built a website before, don't know how. I'm sure that given enough time on Google I could learn how to slap up a few pages and link them together, but for Acholi Beads we wanted something better. We wanted to represent the beads makers work in a way that reflects its elegance and creativity. So I called Aaron.

Aaron and I met in high school. We became good friends, coffee friends, drinking mochas late into the night, our conversations always veering towards how we would, eventually, team up to change the world. Or, you know, take it over. We were sixteen.

But I went off to school and Aaron got married. We kept in touch, but didn't have much time for world domination. Then I went to Uganda and Aaron was busy raising his son. We'd occasionally get together when I was visiting the States, but our pursuits rarely crossed each other.

So when I flew out to Phoenix a couple weeks ago to help finish up the Acholi Beads site, I was pumped. Aaron had always been a computer savant, and I had watched from the sidelines as his work progressed - from networking home PCs to play games in high school to running his own web development firm, Xavisys (pronounced: ZAVE-ih-sis). And after all those caffeine fueled conversations about world duarchy, this would be our first time working together.

I was more than pleasantly surprised, I was blown away. Xavisys, under Aaron's leadership, was great to work with on every level. The business details - pricing, invoicing, etc. - were clear and taken care of quickly. Our timeline was ambitious, but Aaron didn't blink. He set an agressive schedule and got to work.

The real pleasure was in developing the site. I had ideas, lots of ideas about how I wanted the site to look, function, feel - things that I had seen on other sites or wished that other sites had, or just flat out made up. Sometimes I felt like it must be too much to ask, but I asked, and Aaron just got more excited and found ways to make it happen. And as the site came together I'd comb through and find little details that I wanted changed, which I can imagine would get pretty annoying for a web developer - having to go back and change a bunch of stuff that was fine the first time. But again, Aaron never flinched. He would go right to it and change it until I liked it.

I came away from Phoenix and working with Xavisys with a big smile on my face. Because I knew we had a great website, because I had found an amazing business to partner with for my online endeavors, and mostly because I got to see a great friend shine. I got to see Aaron in his element, watch him flex his expertise, and he and I got to change the world together, at least a little bit. And you can rest assured, this won't be the last time.

Anyone care to make a short film?

2008-11-02T00:29:00.000-07:00

Idea for a very short film to promote WikiChoice.com (like Radiohead's "All I Need" video)

A movie theater is packed full of Americans. On the screen plays a series of powerful ads - for shoes, for clothes, for electronics. The audience is in awe.

Cut to a dim, noisy sweatshop. Asian children are making shoes, clothes, electronics. An American man in a suit stands over them, barking orders, dolling out punishment.

Back to the theater. The same man in a suit stands at the front of the theater, surrounded by stacks of boxes of new products, and smiling as he jots down orders and sends smiling, uniformed American youth to take the boxes up into the audience and collect money.

Back to the sweat shop. The American man in the suit is angry, shouting that the kids aren't making enough products, that he's going to sell out too quickly.

Back to the theater, the stacks of boxes are almost gone. The American man smiles sheepishly and ducks behind the screen as the ads continue to play. We follow him and find that the sweatshop is right there behind the screen. The man in the suit cocks his harm to hit a child, who screams in fear, but --

Back to the theater. The scream from behind the screen is drowned out by the beginning of the next ad.

Cut to black, and the text: "What will you choose when you know? WikiChoice.com"

There is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

2008-11-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

Recently Google staged the beginning of a contest. They call it "10 to the 100th." They accepted submissions for ideas that would "change the world by helping as many people as possible," and they've put up $10,000,000 to make the winning ideas a reality. I submitted one.

I'm finding it hard to get around the notion that the force shaping today's world more than any other is the rich, Western consumer market. That is, when you or I run to the local Target, we are exercising our share of the world's most powerful aggregate force. Think about it - we're busy making money to buy things, and the rest of the world is busy making those things. More lives are shaped by our collective purchasing decisions than by any other identifiable factor.

The problem is, this power is not recognized by the public, the consumers, us, and so not used intentionally. Those who have recognized it are large multinational corporations, who realize that they can drive down costs by forcing poor people to work in poor conditions, and reap huge profits by advertising their cheaper products to rich people as cool, new, expensive.

And corporations are far more flexible than the governments that regulate them. They can work in many countries at once, while any one government may only govern one. The drive for profits in this void of accountability has led companies to despicable business practices, taking advantage of workers and the environment in countries where the government is unable or unwilling to effectively regulate them.

So now an American mother buying back-to-school clothes for her daughter might be buying clothes made by a little girl who will never go to school. And when a little boy pulls a Christmas chocolate out of his stocking, there's a good chance a little boy in West Africa was enslaved to make that chocolate. And yet still we buy.

We base our purchasing decisions on what will benefit us and our families - what will look good, taste good, feel good, etc. Our main source of information on new products is the litany of commercial advertisments we are subjected to.

But this barrage of ads is a slight of hand, a painting over, a curtain falling between us and the reality of the products we are buying. The truth is that they came from somewhere, they were made by someone, and this history matters far more than whatever version of hip the advertiser wants us to associate his product with. And it's only if we care about and act on this history that we can harness the power of our own purchases and make the changes we'd like to see in the world.

After all, the ultimate power lies with us. We have the money. And if we won't buy it, companies won't make it. Collectively we have the power to improve millions, if not billions of lives, simply by making more informed, more intentional purchases.

So what has kept people from doing that so far? At first I thought it was lack of information, that no one knows where and how products are made, or who makes them. But I have come to learn that it's not that the information isn't out there, it's that it's not accessible. It's spread out across 100 books and 1,000 websites. Many don't know how to go about learning all that would be necessary to make proactive purchases. So what do we do?

This is what I proposed to Google. Create a wiki-based website, like Wikipedia.com, that collects all the information about the ethical practices of all the companies that we buy from. So if all you want is to buy an ethical toothbrush, just do a search on the site for 'toothbrush,' and the five most ethical options will pop-up. If you want to go deeper you can type a company name and read through the collective knowledge of its ethical practices, good and bad. And you can search for an industry, like chocolate, and find out what is happening in the chocolate industry that you might want to consider before buying chocolate.

I call it WikiChoice.com. If Google likes it as much as I do then it will be entered into a round of voting in January, and I will need your help to make sure that this idea is chosen.

Truly, there is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

Radical Equality

2008-10-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my good friend Brian Kiley, a talk a gave recently at his church is up on iTunes as my first ever podcast. The title? "Radical Equality." What did I learn about myself? I can keep a room full of college kids interested for an hour, and I say 'like' too much while speaking. Enjoy!

More poverty than we thought...

2008-08-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Economist relates a World Bank study that claims that $1.00/day is not a good benchmark for extreme poverty. After extensive research on cost of living in various countries, they've reset the mark at $1.25/day.

By this new standard, the number of people in the world who suffer Extreme Poverty is 1,400,000,000. That's 1.4 billion people - 400,000,000 more than previously estimated.

So, the number of people in the world who are extremely poor is four times bigger than the entire population of America.

Just thought you all should know.