One of the best experiences of my life was working with a puma in South America. It required me to run in the jungle for close to 8 hours a day through the most hazardous “trails” imaginable. The point was to try and give these – often injured – cats a healthy and active life. This is a video of me getting jumped on a playful day. My partner luckily had the camera running – capturing a glimpse of what our days often consisted of.
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Nationalism appears to be on the rise again. But this time around, it looks to be a gentler breed: proud, pragmatic and less antagonistic.
The world feels like it’s slowly congealing, not into a sort of gray homogeneous mush, but into a diverse federation of cultures that identify strongly with their heritage and decidedly work together in a system of markets.
This is best captured by the news of Radovan Karadzic’s capture in Serbia. Here is a quote from the New York Times:
Serbs are not desperate and they have not sold out, but they have seen that the nationalist rhetoric and slogans are empty and don’t work,†said Ljiljana Smajlovic, editor of Politika, a leading Serbian daily newspaper. “They see their manifest destiny in Europe.
I’ve never been of a fan of the idea of a world culture or government. It has a influential niche, but it will never be (or at least, I hope it’d never be) universal. Social order works best when applied at a local and regional level, and takes into account distinct population’s leanings. But order and cooperation at a global level is still possible. When we look at history, it is the need of resources that creates conflict. Even religious strife can often be traced to competition of resources.
If the protocol for the allocation of resources is understood by all and considered legitimate by its constituents, then it is possible that seemingly incompatible peoples can work together. Markets appear to be that protocol. The fear, though, has been that a single dominant market can – and will eventually – envelop its smaller members – as many think the United States has been doing across the world. But as countries have matured in this global system, we are seeing a re-embrace of regionalism at the cultural level, but globalism at an economic level. I think the European Union – for all its flaws – is a model of a wide system that leaves each region autonomous, while providing a framework for cooporation. And the positive reaction of the Serbian population on the capture of Karadzic, shows the value of markets, even among extremely proud people.
But Google depends crucially and directly on the content created by users and more generally on the goodwill of the Internet community.
Equally, so do the many products Google creates and gives away, with no obvious path to future profit.
So, more than in the past, it makes sense for corporations to cultivate diffuse goodwill, rather than focusing solely on profit, perhaps modified by the need to buy off powerful interests.
I agree with your conclusions, but disagree with your analysis. Isn’t it more likely that the rules for making a profit have changed? It is not goodwill for the sake of goodness; it’s good – or at least the perception of goodness – that now helps yield profits.
Google creates products ‘with no obvious path to future profit’ because it understands that technology has changed the way business is done and the new methods require an embrace of creativity. But the motivations are still the same.
If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of ‘profits’ (as some people in this comment section appear to be) then nothing about the way the world is changing is encouraging. However, I think there is something else going on here. While the motivation is still profits, technology, which is so widely accessible, needs to provide something more than functionality. Functionality is easily replicated. What’s left is an aura. Something you use because you ‘believe’ in it, somehow.
That can be accomplished by branding. But also by what someone does with their money. So what a hotshot CEO does with their money is part of the ‘aura’ of goodness. This explains things like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google Foundation and all those little foundations scattered around the Bay Area, created by a new breed instant millionaires, who promise to be ‘good.’ And actually do end up doing good things.
That changes the argument of profits, doesn’t it? If people are doing something worthwhile with the money they make, then what’s the problem? You can easily reduce anyone’s actions into selfish motivations and you would have proved almost nothing. It’s external actions that matter most. It appears that we are moving in a direction that encourages both profits and goodwill.
Joshua Heineman started an interesting project called Reaching for the Out of Reach. The basic idea is to bring new life and a new audience to interesting works of our past. He’s using the New York Public Library website as his source for digging up digitized stereographs and quickly alternating between the two images, simulating the illusion of looking through stereoscope. The way a stereograph works is simple: simultaneously look at two slightly different images and your brain will give the sense of depth. A stereograph isolates each photo to an eye, but flipping between also seems to work. Here are two of my favorites. The rest are found on this website.
I imported my posts from the Future of the Book. I haven’t had a to chance to import the comments but I will possibly do that at some point in the future. I’ve also been developing a new WordPress plugin that allows users to reorder the posts on my blog by simply dragging and dropping. The concept is simple: emulate serendipitous encounters of finding interesting misplaced books. I will deploy it soon, and release it soon there after.
I’ve aborted the project. It was giving me some problems and I’ve been too involved littlesis to continue it at this point.
I’ve just returned from an amazing trip through South America. I started in Argentina and made my way north, through Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, eventually flying back home from Lima.
But now, I am back in the States and enjoying transitioning back to normal life. I hope to develop a few projects that have been on the back burner for a while now.
I live in Facebook land, but frequent a summer home in the Wikipedia islands. Where do you live?
I’ve never been a big fan of zoos. When I visit them I feel horrible for knowing what these animals must endure (like the polar bear I saw in Central Park licking a block of ice on a hot summer day) and then feel guilty for getting pleasure out of seeing these awesome creatures. But even then, I can’t shake the feeling that zoos are from a different time; a time when circuses and freak shows were key forms of entertainment. But things have changed, and it leaves me to wonder whether it’s time that we move away from zoos, focus on preservation, and come to accept that wild animals should not be confined.
The laws protecting animals are often well intentioned and the people working with them the most caring. So my issue is not with the laws, the people or great resource that zoos provide; they do what they can under the system we have in place. It is with the basic ethical issue of institutionally stripping animals from their natural habitat and creating an artificial world for them for our benifit. I am questioning the means, not the ends.
Modern ethics tell us that there is something intrinsically wrong with trapping someone, restricting their behavior and performing (physical or psychological) experiments on them. That’s why we don’t have humans in zoos. But even then, it wasn’t until 1974, with the creation of the IRB, that restrictions were applied to certain kinds behavioral experiment on humans…. so don’t count on laws, or even science, to be on par with ethics. We have to all realized it ourselves.
So why don’t our ethical revelations apply to animals? The old argument involved something about animals not having “souls.“ The modern argument morphed into something about animals not being “conscious”, giving us free reign over their lives under the guise that they don’t know what is happening to them anyway. But we don’t have a good idea of what consciousness is so we can’t use that as a fair argument. What we do know is that large animals, especially social ones, have natural behavior stifled by enclosures. The big cats, like lions, leopards and cheetahs often have territories that cover 50 square kilometers. Something zoos, especially urban zoos, cannot provide. So what happens to these animals? They go crazy. They pace. They pull out their hair. They ram into into things. They lash out. And often die.
I found the following quote in Wikipedia:
Historians Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier cite statistics showing that three-quarters of apes die in captivity within the first twenty months, with the overall “stock turnover“ of animals being one-fifth to one-fourth over the course of a year. They further note that this “extreme mortality of wild animals in zoos has always been the driving force behind the massive scale of importations.“
Additionally, many thousands of animals are placed on “surplus lists“ each year, where they are sold to, among other places, “circuses, animal merchants, auctions, individual pet owners, “game farms,“ “hunting ranches,“ and “trophy collectors.“
That system feels flawed.
I am not calling out for the abolishment of zoos, but I think that there needs to be a complete reconsidering of the role zoos play in our society that starts from the bottom and works its way up.
The basic conditions I would feel comfortable with a modern zoo meeting are: First, no “exotic“ animals in urban areas. Zoos should focus on the land’s indigenous creatures. The idea that I should be able to see, even study, a tiger locally unrealistic. If you want to see a tiger, it’s less risky for you to go to India than importing a tiger from India to every major city. Second: focus on preserving, expanding and creating national parks. Let the animals live free and study them at a distance – intervene only when necessary. And third: Limit human contact. Educate the public with films and documentaries, like March of the Penguin and Planet Earth, and tap into that sympathy to build support and expand protection. Modern media technologies, like high definition DVDs, allow us to learn more about our world, while leaving little or no impact on the environment.
Zoos are kind of a tricky thing. You can argue that restricting some of these animals to areas much smaller than their natural habitat constitutes a form of abuse. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine that some people grow to love and appreciate animals from seeing them in a zoo. So you could make the argument that a small number of specimens from a species must suffer in zoos in order to elicit preservation for the remaining specimens living in the wild. Also, some species are so endangered in the wild that the only safe place for them to be is in zoos. None of this is to argue that zoos are an ideal solution, though. One compromise might be for States or countries to go the extreme route. Instead of having a zoo in each major city with exotic animals, how about having a single very large regional zoo? This way, some animals could be given almost the amount of roaming space that they would normally expect in the wild, although this could be problematic for truly mobile animals like birds.
BTW, Eddie you need to blog on your trip to South America soon!
CommentPress has been getting really nice attention: Kathleen Fitzpatrick recently published “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts” with the Journal of Electronic Publishing at University of Michigan this fall.
This connection, in CommentPress, of an experiment into the organization of digital text with a desire to promote social interaction within and around it offers us the opportunity to resituate the problem of electronic publishing in a potentially productive way, and in so doing compels a new perspective on certain aspects of the historical development of publishing. This paper will take that look backward as a means of considering the significance of a project like CommentPress — which should be understood not as the apotheosis of electronic publishing, but rather as one example of a fruitful avenue of development — for the future of textuality online.
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article on CommentPress!
Here is a quote:
With CommentPress, released in July by the Institute for the Future of the Book, designers have endeavored to help digital books capture the immediacy and interactivity of the margin
note. “Text is meant to be a conversation,” says Ben Vershbow, an associate director at the institute, which is sponsored by the University of Southern California but is based in Brooklyn. “We’ve tried to create a reading environment that is more dynamic than you’d usually find on
a Web site.”
And:
The program — a template used with WordPress, a popular open-source blogging program — lets any scholar convert a book or paper into a digital text that can be analyzed and
commented upon by many readers.That stands in sharp contrast to digital books, some of which come strewn with hyperlinks that let readers simulate the experience of moving from footnote to footnote, but don’t let
readers interact.Traditional blogs let authors excerpt from books and then provide space beneath the text for readers to add their own comments. But CommentPress’s innovation, according to Mr.
Vershbow, is to “slightly rejigger the hierarchy of discussion, by putting comments next to text.” While a blog might support one linear conversation, he says, CommentPress lets
readers pull out multiple strands of text to start their own distinct discussions.
matt are discussing. 
Andrew is discussing.
matt 2:11 am on August 17, 2008 Permalink
holy wow!
Chris 12:26 pm on January 1, 2009 Permalink
el diablo!
Tu si ta loco hermano!