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| Thursday, September 21, 2006 |
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We're here 
Mitch on fire
| | Back when Cluetrain first came out, and lots of people got on the bandwagontrain, one potential passenger stood out in his reluctance. That was Mitch Ratcliffe. I remember a panel or two where we (and Mitch) went out of our way to make sure the skeptical view was represented. And Mitch did a great job at that, even as — over the years since — Mitch has also advocated many of the ideas Cluetrain presented. |
| | All the recent ideas—emergence, wisdom of the crowds, tipping points, etc., etc.—about why the Net works seek to rationalize the product of networked thinking. They are often read as justifying any idea that emerges from network conversations, but they are each fleeting explanations of how, sometimes, smart results appear in human history. Socrates was the wisest man in all Greece, according to the Delphic oracle because (and only Socrates got the joke) he often insisted he didn't know anything at all. Instead, he examined ideas on their merits, moving beyond the fact that an idea was Greek or Sophist or was the product of a friend. He insisted on rigorous questioning. It pissed off some people and they tried and executed him for impiety. |
| | We live in a time of branding of every little notion—because that's how "knolwedge workers" differentiate themselves—with most folks ignoring the vast reservoir of history that informs their thoughts. Branded notions defy rigorous questioning, which is why so much is just being rediscovered all over again rather than actually improved. Our egos often prevent us from coming into history as critical beings, because we are so strongly tempted to see our own brilliance in every trivial individual realization. Far from living in community, which exists only in an environment of plurality, many people today live in virtual sensoriums that reward them with the pleasurable childlike experience of living in virtual ignorance of everything that exists, their lives a process of "discovery" of the most mundane things. |
| | We go along with others with whom we find agreement, feigning debate by setting up false dichotomies on which our existing absolute views will allow quick agreement. The evidence: We count up everything and proclaim those with the most winners, even when we know that being the outlier, apart from the crowd, is often the only noble position in contemporary debates. An earthworks of bullshit can hold back a torrent of truth if the purveyors of nonsense are sufficiently motivated to keep piling their partial truths on the dam. |
| | The irony is that there are genuine "blink" events, "tipping points," and ideas that represent the wisdom of the occasional crowd, but we fail to recognize those because every little tick of the collective consciousness is treated like revelation, mostly because we've all become marketers rather than engaging in communication. It's not hard to understand why—the social and political atmosphere has become a long siege on the individual will that seeks to break down the differences that make markets less manageable, less cohesive. |
| | Read the whole thing. And see how the world appears when you crank down the applause and listen to what's actually being said, or what's actually going on. |
| | Mitch quotes Socrates (just ahead of the excerpted section). I'll quote two relative moderns. Whitman... |
| | You shall no longer take things at second or third hand...
nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books.
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me.
You shall listen to all sides and filter them for yourself.
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| | There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried... |
| | We're still working out the Enlightenment. And probably whatever it was that Socrates knew he wasn't the first to have started. |
Daily Day Fire stats
| | The Widfire Viewer lets you zoom in on a map that's much clearer than the official one. But it's some kind of flash thing, so you can't link directly to the closest view. Looking from there to Google Earth, I can see that Sespe Hot Springs is inside the perimeter area, while Willett Hot Springe is not. Nor is Jackson Falls. |
How the West was found
| | Why We Fly a terrific tour of the West in a small airplane, by two brothers en route from Sacramento to Oshkosh and back this past July. It's a flash movie linked to by my cousin Mark, a pilot, in an email by the same title. Here's Mark in his own tour of coastal North Carolina around the same time. |
| | I know there is a non-flash gallery of the same series, but I can't find it right now. |
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