“Stay hungry, stay foolish” – dip into the Well

Just when you think someone is “The Enemy”, maybe even “The Other“.. up springs a lovely, unifying surprise. Yep, it’s (still) all connected.

I’ve just joined The Well. Found myself wanting to get stuck into Bruce Sterling types again (rant rant nihilistic, post-modern, partiarchal “Technology is God” tossers).. still downloading from the LIFT experience. But then I realised I did not know enough about him or more to the point, what “he” represents to do this with a clear(er) conscience, more considered opinion.

Of course his very special wife, feminist activist/writer/film maker Jasmina Tesanovic was a red herring stuck in my rising bile – and should have alerted me to there being some potenial yin & yang in the equation.

Then I went to Brucey’s Wikipedia entry, his website, (intrigued by the shortness and meaning of the domain name) and then linked it back to… The Well. Well well well. What a place

I have come home after another long journey, and I smell nice things cooking.

I’m diving in. The Well describes itself as:

“a gathering that’s like none other — remarkably uninhibited, intelligent and iconoclastic.

“The regulars in this place include noted authors, programmers, journalists, activists and other creative people who swap info, test their convictions and banter with one another in wide-ranging conversations.”

Yeah yeah, you’re all fab. Alles Gutte. But it was when I saw the roots of it coming from The Whole Earth Catalog that my heart and mind were won over. Many things clicked into place. Bruce couldn’t be all bad, maybe just a bit misguided or misunderstood! There was more to reveal. It looked like a place for my integrated/complementaty thinking/being to emerge into more light. The Yin & Yang thing again. Science and Gaia, unified?

Steve Jobs was also an early adopter:

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation…. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” During the commencement speech Jobs also quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the 1974 edition of the catalog: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” (from Wikipedia entry)

Now I can see the origins of my internet addiction, indeed why I married my husband Graeme Sutherland, as he woo-ed me with utopian visions of appropiate, world changing technology.

I grew up with The Whole Earth Catalog (then Whole Earth Review > now Magazine). I was young, but it was ever so formative, as were the joints and conversations around the table of that expansive, bohemian childhood. It was THERE, everyhere. As ubiquitous and omnipotent as the bible, more so (hey Steve, you stole my line). I am having an epiphany right now just thinking about it. Must find out if Tim Berners-Lee read it before he invented the WWW.

Well… it looks like there is more to know about Bruce and his very much extended community. If any of you have Well stories or WEC>R>M to tell, do tell. I shall restrain myself from posting a Bruce-esque diatribe until I get a better context.

In the meantime, here’s the umpteenth profile I have submitted this year. I have most definitely joined Well. Interesting to see all these different selves we portray isn’t it. Thank goodness I have Buddhism and meditation to help me discover who I really am / am not. Ha! Another cosmic joke.

I particularly enjoyed writing this one, I think because I had a better idea of who the community was and how I am right now, having just come through a very heavy bit of navel gazing. All very self-indulgent and self-referential, but I wrote it for myself first I guess.

“Hello hello. I’m a West Australian-born woman who has finally made it back to Europe. We chose (digital / gay / pagan / close to London / Gatwick etc) Brighton, just like Second Life has – but for very, very different reasons. We chose Europe, or it chose us. I have a 7 year old girl and am well into looking at the world as her generation’s advocate. My card says “I help people express, connect, learn” because we teach what we most want to learn. I love learning > evolving. I am an educator / activist / social entrepreneur / Buddish-pagan / future-aware / whimsical / eccentric / meditating / social constructivist / idealistic realist / Leunig, Harold Maude, Nick Cave, Schubert lover with a real hope that humanity can get it’s shit together FAST and move on from the “Technology / Man is God” paradigm towards more integrated, creative, intelligent, kind, humble, interconnected ways of being and relating… before Gaia swallows us whole.”

There is just one tiny issue of the massive ego’s in question here, and the place of humility in the search for real wisdom. But we’re working on that, aren’t we Brucey.

Bruce Sterling Opens LIFT

Nikolas + Carla = black swan factor

The High Impact of the Unexpected

I love Bruce Sterling. His book Disruption has stayed with me for over a decade. His predictions about the way technology will create even more manipulative political campaigns have come to pass. Think: the President-elect with an ear bud connected to feedback system in realtime that tells him what to say to keep the audience happy… Think: the shadowy power behind the throne with their hand fair-up-the-clackers of the puppet king.

The way he described how trust and reputation would be created and served online have come to pass. Think Couchsurfing or epinions and how we now expect our online karma to run over old-world dogma. Hyperlinks keep subverting hierarchy and our actions speak louder than our job title. New kinds of community can emerge.

Brucey baby’s laconic, voice of reason tells it like it is. 2008 is going to be a crap year, he says. Nothing to really inspire or motivate us there. Sorry. So he takes us on a random riff about this and that, building rapport and entertaining.

It’s great to see the work of futurism and journalism brought into an idiosyncratic person style that engages you and makes no false claims to empirical science.

What is truth and reality anyway? Outside of the physiological fact of the way hearts and lungs function, most claims to truth are subjective anyway, so why try and pretend otherwise. So why not take part in truth yourself….
I will always trust the word of someone who puts themselves fully into the frame. I want to know the context, the editor.

Bruce knows what’s going on in the world and has a great skill for feeding it back to us in a way we want to hear.

He said Gates would rather try and cure malaria than stay at Microsoft pretend Microsoft is interesting. There were a range of insightful remarks in his opening.

Then the Sarkozy / Bruni obsession began. Entertaining, well thought out, well communicated. The central point being, they are a “Black Swan” (”a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations”) when looked at as a futurist. That their rise and rise to power in 2008 marks a point in time we should be looking at. His scenarios involving the axes of ambition and publicity led to a central predication about the Empress Bruni becoming a central figure in the world, bringing together the power of celebrity and politics like perhaps never before.

I agree with him. I’m just not sure why it is was a keynote for LIFT. There are a great many other topics that might have been more relevant. Mind you, knowing Bruce, the Black Swans might just turn out to be flying into our digital Twin Towers.

And I can’t finish without mentioning my hometown Perth is the only place you can find a real black swan, bizarrely. But I found a pair in Norfolk the other day. What is it with these birds? They’re starting to follow me all around the world. Is it a sign to phone my Mum?