A Samurai warrior had the duty to avenge he murder of his overlord. After some time he found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord.

Stolen from Paul

Of many reasons Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, one was not so much to make a statement of the truth as to make a statement which, thrown in the scales against accredited views, would correct their bias and leave the balance adjusted accurately. He felt, for example, how much there was to be said on the side of conservatism, and would sometimes insist in conversation that he was a conservative himself. But he could trust the case of conservatism to get itself stated elsewhere; brute nature iterated it tirelessly. He, therefore, threw his whole weight upon the side of progress by writing Leaves of Grass as a liberal-charged opus to sex, gay relationships, blasphemy, and the holiness of the common man.

Whitman’s intent came to mind as I read this self-proclaimed manifesto in Harper’s Magazine. While no Leaves of Grass, “The Serfdom of Crowds” is a diatribe thrown in the scales against accredited views of open culture to correct their bias and leave the balance adjusted accurately.

I quote pieces below, but be sure to read the whole article.

The central faith embedded in Web technologies whereby users not only consumer information but widely generate it is the idea that the Internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The design guided by this perverse kind of faith leave people in the shadows. Computers will soon get so big and fast, and the Internet so rich with information, that people will be obsolete, either left behind like the characters in Rapture novels or subsumed into some cyber-superhuman something. Silicon Valley culture has taken to enshrining this vague idea and spreading it the only way technologies can: in the design of software.
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People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart….We have repeatedly demonstrated our species bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic artificial intelligence projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever?...
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An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social-networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to user the services? Well, yes, I am. I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished.
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The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless….The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers – we might call them messianic advertisers – who could someday show up….
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There is, unfortunately, only one entity that can maintain its value as everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe. Advertising is now singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more contextual, and the content of the ad is absolutely sacrosanct….
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If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contact is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.

"In our society, mainly concerned with production and efficiency, the drama is that our capacity for questioning, still so vivid in early childhood, is very quickly eradicated or pushed aside for the benefit of our capacity for answering. When a child has a real question, most of the time he is immediately given a stupid answer. In the best cases the educator goes to the dictionary to be sure his answer is accurate. But anyhow unconsciously, if not proudly, he closes the question. From school to the end of our life it is always necessary to answer. We are compelled to learn how to answer. If we don't know how to answer, we are just no good. So little by little we become some kind of model machine able-to-answer-to-all-situations with all the necessary blindness as regards its own contradictions. That kind of answering, whose degree of sophistication may sometimes hide from us its conditioned character, is required by our life. But under its dominating necessity, is it possible to keep alive in ourselves our most authentic and precious capacity, which is questioning?"

"Man's Ever New and Eternal Challenge" 
Dr. Michel de Salzmann's chapter in "On the Way to Self Knowledge", Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976

In a Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007 a man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approximately two thousand people went through the station. The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened. About 20 gave money but continued on their way. The man collected a total of $32. There was no applause when Joshua Bell finished his concert. Bell is one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, he had sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100. Bell’s incognito appearance in the Metro was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities: In a workaday environment do we perceive beauty? If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made, how many other things are we missing?

Excerpt from Wired article "In the Next Industiral Revolution, Atoms are the New Bits":
 
Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.
This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

Now the same is happening to manufacturing — the long tail of things.

The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.

Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.

“Hardware is becoming much more like software,” as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it. That’s not just because there’s so much software in hardware these days, with products becoming little more than intellectual property wrapped in commodity materials, whether it’s the code that drives the off-the-shelf chips in gadgets or the 3-D design files that drive manufacturing. It’s also because of the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution.

We’ve seen this picture before: It’s what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.

The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony. This change is driven by two forces. First, the explosion in cheap and powerful prototyping tools, which have become easier to use by non-engineers. And second, the economic crisis has triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, Web-centric, and open to custom work (where the volumes are lower but the margins higher).

The result has allowed online innovation to extend to the real world. As Cory Doctorow puts it in his new book, Makers, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”

A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.

In short, atoms are the new bits.

From Making Art out of an Encounter:

"I first encountered Tino Sehgal’s work under ideal conditions: total ignorance. Happening to be in Berlin in 2006 at the time of the city’s art biennial, I heard from an art-dealer friend that there was one exhibition not to miss. “I won’t tell you anything more,” he said, as he walked me to the site and bid me farewell. I trod up a creaking staircase in a building from the turn of the last century and entered a decayed ballroom, its ornate moldings and gilt mirrors testifying to a more glorious past. Lying on the floor, a man and a woman, fully dressed, were embracing languidly. There was no one else in the room. My presence went unacknowledged. In a state of mounting confusion and embarrassment, I stayed until I could stand it no longer, and then I retreated down the staircase. Out on the street, I sighed with relief, because I once again knew where I was.

Had I remained longer, I might have recognized that the two were re-enacting the curved-arm caressing gesture of Rodin’s marble statue “The Kiss,” as well as poses from other osculatory works, some less widely known but in their own way iconic, like Jeff Koons’s ceramic sculpture series “Made in Heaven.” And eventually I would have heard one member of the intertwined couple speak these words: “Tino Sehgal. ‘Kiss.’ 2002.” But I didn’t need that information for the piece to linger in my memory and arouse my curiosity.

I knew the name of the artist, and I watched for him. Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.
...
Sehgal makes art that does not require the transformation of any materials. He refuses to add objects to a society that he says is overly encumbered with them.

It’s his rigorous devotion to an art that vanishes instantly that Sehgal and his curators emphasize. “There’s a purity to his approach,” says Catherine Wood, the curator of contemporary art and performance at the Tate Modern in London. “There are a few artists who are making live action that is based in sculpture, but what sets him apart is his purist insistence on the immateriality — or ephemeral materiality — of the work, so it crystallizes and disperses again, so there is no trace left at all.” ...
...
The act of going to a logical extreme can have illuminating results. Yasmil Raymond, who worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for five years before becoming a curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, says that the Walker’s acquisition of a Sehgal work, “This Objective of That Object,” was the most contentious in her time there. In the piece, five interpreters surround a visitor, turn their backs to her and declaim, “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” If the visitor says nothing, the interpreters will eventually crumple to the floor; but a response will reanimate them, and one of them will cry, “A comment, a comment, we have a comment!” And at that, with the visitor’s comment as a starting point, a conversation begins. ...
...
With “This Is Good” (2001), the first of his constructed situations, each new arrival of a visitor triggers an activity of limited duration; it is as if the piece were a kinetic sculpture powered by a push button. When someone enters the gallery, a guard begins windmilling his arms and hopping from one leg to the other and then says: “Tino Sehgal. ‘This Is Good.’ 2001.” Calling attention to the usually unnoticed employees in a museum, the piece plays off Sehgal’s mission to make people, not objects, the material of his work. But the payoff is limited. Things got more interesting with “This Is Exchange” (2003), in which the visitor is enlisted as a co-producer of the piece. At the entrance to the museum, a ticket taker asks the visitor to engage in a conversation about the market economy; after five minutes, if a ticket buyer who agreed to the request is still gamely playing along, she receives a partial refund of the admission fee. For many visitors, especially those who argued that they detested the market economy, it came as an unsettling surprise to receive this reminder that whatever their opinion of it, they were nonetheless immersed in it. Which, of course, was one of Sehgal’s aims.
...
A little later in the discussion, the man returned to his theme. “So I guess you’re saying your ambition is to change perception,” he said. “Is that correct?” And this time, Sehgal took the bait.

“That’s a very simple way of saying what I’m doing,” he said. “For the last two or three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed also over the last two or three hundred years as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and it’s not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I refocus attention to human relations.”

"...questions that are more related to empathy [are] really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. ....The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family."

Here is a good Fast Company article about the struggle of companies to do good profitably. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, had some interesting thoughts:

This past Saturday was a day of contradiction for me.

That afternoon I went to see Collapse, a movie – really a 1.5 hour interview – about Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD officer turned investigative reporter, soothsayer of the financial crisis, and publisher of the newsletter, “From the Wilderness”. “Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He is especially passionate about the issue of peak oil…. Ruppert doesn't hold back at sounding an alarm, portraying an apocalyptic future.” (via)

Later that evening, I watched CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute. It’s an award show taped before 3,00 people honoring everyday people who have made a difference in improving people’s lives. Among those honored was 20-yr-old Jordan James who fought to ensure amputee children received the prosthetic limbs insurance companies too often deny them. Another was Betty Makoni, an African woman, who created Girl Child Network – an organization that helps girls escape sexual abuse in a country where it is widely believed that if a man with AIDS/HIV rapes a virgin, he will be cured of his disease.

Both stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. One fills us with a sense of fatalism and weakness. The other fills us with a sense of self-determinism and strength.

And, truth be told, both stories are necessary. Ruppert’s story shakes us out of complacency by revealing the intensity of our problems. Jordan and Betty’s stories drive home the truth that our hands can create change even if it’s against intimidating insurance companies and cultural myths.

Each is better when balanced by the other.

But with each newspaper delivery, the Rupert stories seem to multiply like hives: War; Peak Oil; National security concerns; Weak healthcare reform; Animal extinctions; Rainforest deforestation; SARs; Avian Flu; Swine Flu; Russian and Chinese hackers; Water scarcity; Global Warming; Declining Bee populations…. While these stories are necessary, they come with a catch: if we amplify too many "Ruppert stories” to shake us up, the end result will be a self-inflicted form of Shaken Baby Syndrome.

More than ever, we need a shift in story telling. We need the Jordan and Betty stories to balance out the weight Ruppert’s stories place on our hearts.

But, at this point, simply “sharing” these stories would be like whispering about electric-powered cars at a NASCAR race.

We have to do better. We have to elevate and amplify Jordan and Betty stories. CNN Heroes is an admirable step in that direction. The program gives a primetime platform, and celebrity to individuals that deserve our applause. It puts pomp and circumstance around the only values that matter to our future: generosity, self-motivation, creativity and local-action. And, as we watch, we yearn to imitate those values and those people.

In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo gives voice to such an imperative. 'There are two ways to escape suffering from the inferno where we live every day,’ says Polo. The first is to 'accept the inferno and become part of it so that you can no longer see it.' The second 'is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who, in the midst of the inferno, is not the inferno. Then make them endure; give them space” (Invisible Cities, 165). (via)

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that life always moves toward the good. Jordan and Betty stories show us where the good hides in the inferno.

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This was my favorite of the CNN heroes: