Social Hallucinations

Back to Blogging

It's a long time since I've been here and wrote anything. It may look like I've abandoned my Social Hallucinations. Only spammers seemed to enjoy my absence, the less I wrote, the more spam comments and trackbacks they posted here. It's almost like hyenas that sensed that I didn't care. I did care but suddenly life struck me with its dose of suffering, serious problems to take care of and significant decision to be taken. I needed to prioritize. There hasn't been enough time for everything. With my fierce nature of jumping into projects and putting all my heart into them, it wasn't easy to find balance and put some things, like blogging and twittering on hold. It gives a perspective and fresh look. The less time I spent on twitter the less updated I was and unread posts in RSS feed piled up. What I've discovered was how much pollution I was exposed to. 3000 unread posts, maybe 100 worth of reading, thousands of tweets each day, 95% crap, social media guru-shmuru bullshit all day long, self-promotion, mutual masturbation of experts supporting and RT one another. I've realized I was trapped in the hunt of information, in the unfulfilled need of being on and up-to-date all the time. Why? Glittering lure of the new social web where there is little social but majority of information being pushed via various pipes. I took a break, looked at the blue sky and I realized I needed to clean up. So here I am at the beginning of my summer break ready to clean up the information clutter I've created around myself. I am ready to cut down and balance the digital life. And I am looking forward to get back following and having interesting conversations with some great people I've met in cyberspace, writing down my "social hallucinations”, getting wiser and just having fun. I do start it with reading paper book of Hugh "Ignore Everybody". Have a great summer! See you around :-)

Social(istic) Media or The Rise of the New Capitalism?

From now and then, there are voices talking about the digital media and the possibilities they bring - the driving force behind the new socialism era. But the question is whether the possibilities created by the digital media make socialism possible, or whether what we see is the rise of the new capitalism.

Image via Wikipedia

Socialism (latin societas - community) is the ambiguous term, referring to attempts to reduce social inequality and the spread of social services, treatment or management of social control through state institutions, local government, corporation or cooperative). What's common for various types of socialism is partial or total rejection of  the idea of capitalist free market, the restriction of private property and promotion of the idea of social justice. The aim was to build a socialistic society without poverty, where market forces are not the primary mechanism for distribution of wealth and where the functioning of society is based on common ownership, mutual cooperation and altruism. Beautiful idea but never proved to work (or fail - as it is not compatible with human nature). We are herd animals, but every herd needs the leader and clearly defined roles to ensure the proper functioning and survival of the group.

The whole problem with socialism is that the idea of socialism looks good on paper:

You have two cows. The government takes them and puts in the cowshed with other cows. You have to look after all the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.

Image by publicenergy via Flickr

Then you have the real socialism (which I experienced and would never recommend to anyone as one of the most humiliating systems to an individual and humanity):

You have two cows. The government takes them and puts in the cowshed with other cows that is taken care of by a former poultry farmer. You have to deal with the chickens, which the government took away from the farmers who are in charge of cowsheds. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as law allows, not as much as you need.

Third option is the national socialism - total exploitation, mean capitalism in disguise:

You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to care for them and sells you the milk with the flag state.

Sharing, cooperation and collaboration that are characteristic for the social media aren't quite working in the socialism, because there are always institutions watching and controlling the sharing or collaboration and trying to regulate those with laws. Maybe not a bad idea, but where regulations and power are involved, the inequalities usually emerge.
Of course there are also some positive sides in socialism, because it focuses on the common good but I can't see its chances to thrive in the world where people value their privacy and right to property. We are too independent and focused on our own success and own profits, driven by our needs. The value is YOU. Youniverse & Meritocracy are what drives the digital media evolution.

What we observe today is the rise of the new networked capitalism with intellect as the form of social capital that increases with use and the new digital opportunities are facilitators that drive the intellect growth. The value of the corporations in the new capitalism era - cognitive capitalism - comes from their ability to create new communication tools (Google), connect people (Facebook, Twitter), etc. Personal drivers as taste, creativity plays a huge role in the production process (Nike ID, Aston Martin). The property rights in relation to intellectual property also dramatically change (Napster).

In the industrial capitalism machines sucked workers in, depersonalized and automatized work, today computers / software sucked our knowledge, mashed it up and customized it getting it available and usable / reusable at every click. The question is not longer how much you produce but how much you manage to seed. The more you seed the more growth you create. What justify the existence and enhances the power of our ideas are their ability to spread and inseminate other minds (self-promotion happens to be quite effective insemination technique when used right) - twitter, blogs etc. being the tools helping on the way. It means social media has nothing to do with socialism except first 6 letters, they are the new capitalistic means of production and seeding. The question whether they contribute to the common wealth or satisfy egoistic needs and ambitions, I will leave open for now...

Image by diankarl*www.diankarlina.com* via Flickr

Sources:

Capitalisme cognitif (Le):nouvelle grande transformation, Moulier Boutang Yann

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online, Wired

Weekend Awesomeness

It is an awesome video giving you the exceptional experience of the sky. I simply love it! Turn the lights off so we can experience the real beauty of the sky.

Timescapes Timelapse: Learning to Fly from Tom @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

Read more on the Timescapes website

Quote for the upcoming week

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

(William James)

Can You See Any Black Swan in Your Rear-view Mirror?

I am currently reading the fantastic "The Black Swan" by  Nassim Nicholas Taleb a narrative of the importance of the highly improbable events that influence our existence and change the history we believed to be predicted and to happen as planned. The Black Swans are the metaphor for things we don't know before we see them and we rarely tend to notice them as we are focused on looking back.

"Trying to predict the future based on research is like trying to drive a car by looking in the rear-view mirror."

                                                                                                                (Marshall McLuhan)

While being unexeptionally busy with looking back, we hit black swans and left surprised how could this happen.

I can see one good advice: look forward.



Photo by jcoterhals

Weekend Quote

Sheep or Wolf?

10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world

Cover via Amazon

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity:

1 Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behavior. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximize trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

You can find the whole article here timesonline site.

It's good add on to my previous post on life being a succession of moments.

Life is the succession of the moments

Image by zebra.paperclip via Flickr

I never believed you can be really good at something and make a difference if you are not passionate about what you do. I never believed in polished professionalism as this is the way to being boring. I was never interested in doing things 50%. Boredom is the one of the biggest dangers for our species.

I believe in being true to yourself and if you are not able to put your hear into doing something, just leave it. It is hard to achieve or create something valuable without passion. I struggled a lot last week with heartless professionals and so it happened with some serious family issues.
I've noticed it creates a lot of frustration and friction when engagement hits routines calculated to glide through the days, weeks, all the way to payment check.
I was angry and sad at the same time feeling I hit the wall on all fronts. But giving it a thought, looking into myself, I mobilized myself to find the new ways of infecting people with joy of creation and doing things together, infecting people with engagement. Not judging but trying to create something new.
Working 8-12 hours a day is a waste of your precious life if you spend those hours on just earning money and climbing for titles. Life is the succession of the moments, use them and squeeze them so you can feel it.  Hurry to love, hurry to experience and enjoy, people and moments vanish so sudden...

Dissolving the Meaning

I've been going through oceans of fluff written by social media experts. 5 tips how to... 10 advice on how not to do...etc.
Many social media experts are on their quest to rule the world the way mass media did and still do. Social media experts claim the right to be legislators and impose us values. Their advice is becoming a contemporary myth, telling us what the best behavior is. Their efforts focus on convincing the world they say the truth. They are not neutral. They don't create the meaning for the social media. They make the meaning disappear, they dissolve the meaning of the communication facilitated by social media.
Communication that is impossible to reject, because it is the context and the background of contemporary times. Communication that teaches us about ourselves and our reality. If social media disappeared suddenly, we would feel like abandoned on the desert island...

Photo by Ahmed

Good Ideas Goes London

On 30th January 2009, PSFK will host a day long Good Ideas Salon in London to discuss ideas in the fields of arts & culture, collaboration, design, digital, makreting, mobile and youth.

There are great speakers ready to share their beautiful mind:

Pat Connor \ Vision Development Executive \\ BBC
Kate Moross \\ Designer
Coralie Bickford-Smith \ Designer \\ Penguin
Matt Brown \ Editor \\ Londonist
Mark Earls \ Author \\ Herd
Jeremy Ettinghausen \ Director of Digital \\ Penguin Piers Fawkes \ Trends Analyst & Founder \\ PSFK
Amanda Gore \ Trends Consultant \\ PSFK
Matt Hardisty \ Founder \\ Analog Folk
Dan Hon \ Founder \\ Six To Start
Sophie Howarth \ Founder \\ School Of Life
Matt Jones \ Founder \\ Dopplr
Cameron Leslie \ Founder \\ fabric\matter
Colin Nagy \ Partner \ Attention
Colin Nightingale \ Creative Director \\ Punchdrunk \ Founder \\ Gideon Reeling
Jenny Owen \ Founder \\ Ruby Pseudo
Christian Nold \\ Artist
Justin Quirk \ Associate Editor \\ FHM
Nicolas Roope \ Founder \\ Hulger\Poke
Taryn Ross \ Founder \\ Urban Junkies
Richard Banks \ Interface Designer \\ Microsoft
Mike Butcher \ Journalist \\ Mbites
Jonathan MacDonald \ Senior Consultant \\ Ogilvy
Paul Graham \ Partner \\ Anomaly UK
Terry Guy \ Founder \\ Monorex\Secret Wars
Kevin Anderson \ Blogs Editor \\ The Guardian
Simon Waldman \ Director of Digital \\ The Guardian
Paul Andrew Williams \ Film Director \\ Steel Mill Pictures

This is definetely one of the events you can't miss. It is a shame I can't particiate myself.

You can book your ticket here and warm up with Good Ideas Salon from NYC. Lots of great thoughts going on and loads of inspiration.

Words, Words, Words

“When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain” Shakeapeare

This is beautiful visualisation of my blog.

You can get your own here at Wordle site.

Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998 by Bruce Mau - a designer and innovator. He listed those 43 simple points that can be applied as your way of working manifesto. Reading this is a good way for starting 2009.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'
31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Hat tip to John Moore

2009 - Another Chance for Us to Get it Right

31st December - the last day of the year. Soon we are going to say farewell to the 2008 and welcome the New Year. We will make New Year's resolutions believing we have just got a new chance to change things, to do things differently. So let's not waste that opportunity.

In 2008 we've seen the apogee of our greed manifested through conspicuous consumption and its collapse. Aristotle said once "The avarice of human is insatiable" - we proved he was right over 2000 years later. We consume more than we can take. We live in a world where exploitation has reached the perfection. We are tempted everyday and put in the situation we have to choose between values or benefits. We've become the society there is a huge discrepancy between the norms and socially accepted tools to live according to those norms (I am going to write more about it next year). We entered the state of social disorder.

It may sound pessimistic, but if something is broken we can fix it. We can't just fix it with the old broken tools.

One of the most positive things happening in 2008 was the wave of good thinking coming from people like Neil Perkin - Goodness and Happiness, Faris Yakob, Charles Firth, Umair Haque and many many others. They have pointed out that generosity and doing good things are the new way of the strategic thinking. This is the approach we need if we want to make the necessary change and re-find the meaning we've eaten along with other stuff. This caused us a serious indigestion, we come to suffer from in the coming year. 

Instead of trying to predict what will happen, make things happen. It is us who shape the future, so don't waste the time to speak about it - after all we have no idea about it, as it is unpredictable and random as shaped by unpredictable humans creating endless connections and networks of influence. Let's make Doing Meaningful Things to our business model. Stop wasting any type of resources and keep in mind what Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said once: "Less is more".

This is my New Year's Resolution: Make More from Less.
What is yours?

Happy New Year!

I am looking for the brand new year and I wish you all the best in 2009 all my dear readers! Thanks for reading my rants and inspiring me.

Photo by Celeste

7 Things About Me

Who doesn't like talk about themselves? Tagging is the ultimative chance to brag who we are. It is a bit like Facebook status - staging yourself. I was tagged by dirkthecow to repeal some 7 things about myself and than tag 7 more people to do the same.

Let the game begin:

1. I hate communism, totalitarianism and socialism - all those are the worst disasters that can happen to society. I grew up under this regime, I've seen members of my family get arrested cause they believed things they weren't supposed to believe, I've heard stories of tortures in the name of socialism. Besides socialism isImage via Wikipedia against our nature and is the great excuse to abuse and misuse people.

2. I sometimes watch Days of our Lives - those days when I choose to work from home - sofa, cup of tea and daytime TV with two episodes of Days of our Lives, followed by Dr. Phil. What's great about DooL is that no matter how long I've not seen it, I can always follow it without feeling lost. Shh...we don't talk about it anymore, it is embarrassing, I know!

3. I hate lending my books. They are like my babies and I feel so sad when one of them leaves me. I like to know they are on the shelves and I can take them any minute I feel like. They are like my very personal items you never share with anyone.

4. I've played tennis since I was 10 and sometimes dream of how my life would be if I went pro. Tennis is more or less the only sport I do really enjoy, the rest I just do cause it supposed to be good for my health.

5. I ran away from the police once in Berlin after participating in illegal party on the old underground station. I was very close to get arrested and I thought it was sooo cool - I was only 19 years old. The very picture of myself from those times makes me laugh.

6. I get incredible thrill from gambling and I am sure if I let i go I would lose everything I own. The best book on gambling I've ever read is The Gambler by Dostoevsky. I keep it always in my mind when being close to casinos.

7. I love cooking - I think often about having a small and cozy restaurant of my own. There is a wonderful joy in making food for other people.

My 7 nominees are:

Dear Jane Sample - cause I am dying to know more about her

Amelia Torode

Neil Perkin

Adriana Lukas

Jeff Flemings

C.B. Whittemore

Drew McLellan