p2p book reviews

Cognitive Capitalism: Why the molecular economy is coming fast
http://www.businessweek.com:/technology/content/may2004/tc20040525_6837_tc_169.htm

I cannot stress enough the importance of reading this very informative article, which is a three-part reprint of the beginning of the book, “It’s Alive”, which discusses the convergence of information systems and biology.

The first part shows the economic cycle of innovation, which shows we are already in the ‘organisational’, and thus declining phase, of the information economy. The second part shows tha pace of accelerating change, and increasing volatitility, with many concrete examples to back it up, while the third part focuses on the transformation towards the molecular economy. Furthermore, these reprints contain several very existing slides and charts.


BOOK: It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business
by Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis

Two reviews of recent books.

1. Bernard Lahire, La Culture des individus. Dissonances culturelles
et distinction de soi Editions La Decouverte, 780 pp.


Highly praised by Yann-Moulier Boutang in Multitudes as a grand sociological study of French cultural practices, inspired by theories of Bourdieu, Durkheim, Norbert Elias, but also innovating. Examining both legitimate and illegitimate (who are frowned upon by one’s own milieu) cultural choices, it concludes that there is more and more heterogeinity, i.e. that individuals are making their own mixes, beyond what is legitimate or ‘appropriate’ to their station in life.


2. P.M. Menger. Portrait de l'artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme,Paris, Le Seuil, coll. La République des idées, 2003.

In the very important book by Luc Boltansky and Eve Chiapello, Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme,Gallimard, 1999, the authors already discussed how in May 68, both the social critique (about inequity), and the artist critique (about the dullness and un-freedom of contemporary work), had temporarily merged, but then split off again, with the managerial class and its literature, transforming capitlism so that it could respond to the ‘art critique’. Their book is indeed a review of the changes in management literature over the last thirty years. Contemporary work practices in the knowledge economy are indeed more and more ‘bohemian’.

This book here treats about the darker side of this metamorphosis.

" L'analyse du monde du travail artistique nous paraît constituer un bon guide pouridentifier les séductions et les écueils de l¹enrichissement du travail en autonomie, en responsabilité, en créativité, et de l¹exposition vivement inégalitaire aux risques corrélatifs ". YMB is not truly enthousiastic about this book, for more details, see the article in Multitudes 15.: “C'est en effet le sous-titre du livre, Métamorphoses du capitalisme, qui donne la véritable visée de l'auteur. Menger nous parle donc d'une contamination du capitalisme par la figure artistique, par une " justification " d'un genre nouveau. Mais, si nous quittons le domaine de la justification, des habits neufs du Président Capitaliste, à quelle métamorphose l'auteur nous renvoie-t-il ? En fait essentiellement à un certain nombre de transformations du travail contemporain (rien sur l'art contemporain , beaucoup sur le spectacle) qu¹il résume avec bonheur. Sur le plan empirique, rien de plus utile que l'annexe finale de l'ouvrage (p. 93-94) qui montre que la croissance de la masse salariale entre 1987 et 2000 ne suit pas du tout l'explosion des effectifs et surtout des contrats. Autrement dit, plus de travailleurs dans les métiers classés comme artistiques (notamment les intermittents), mais des salaires qui sedégradent par personne et une fragmentation de l'activité en des contrats de plus en plus courts. Ce phénomène de massification et de degradation relative de la " condition salariale artistique " va de pair avec une concurrence accrue, des inégalités vertigineuses, une flexibilité généralisée. La démonstration des chapitres deux et trois, soit les deux tiers de l'ouvrage, ne prête guère à discussion. Le marché du travail artistique n'échappe pas à l'évolution globale du marché du travail précaire. Mieux, il en manifeste tous les symptômes de façon Presque caricaturale. Fin de " l'exception " du monde artistique, donc. En tout cas pour la partie émergente de l'archipel artistique (les artistes reconnus etvivant correctement de leur art) car, faire rimer artiste avec crève la faim, ne date pas du dernier tiers du XXe siècle; c'est même un classique par excellence de la figure de l'artiste romantique maudit, seul, pauvre avant une reconnaissance très tardive ou d'outre-tombe. En revanche, la massification des " travailleurs " classés dans le secteur artistique constitue bel et bien le phénomène nouveau.” données qu'il compile. Le premier chapitre, le seul théorique du livre, passe en revue quatre thèses possibles sur le caractère révélateur ou explicatif de l'activité artistique pour l'ensemble du capitalisme et non pas " sur un ensemble bien étroit du monde économique " (p. 11). Si en effet l'art " symbolise " la mutation du capitalisme, il perd son caractère régional ou sectoriel. Menger examine successivement la thèse de l'art comme vérité utopique de l'homme (celle du Marx des Manuscrits de 1844), l'art comme critique et protestation contre le capitalisme (Adorno), l'art comme facteur dissolvant du capitalisme (Daniel Bell), enfin l'art comme " continent modèle pour le principe d'innovation " (E. Chiapello et L. Boltanski). Il écarte les trois premières positions (il est vrai qu'elles contiennent à la fois la subjectivité, la politique et la visée transformatrice) . La dernière luisert de point de départ, il entend la prolonger en remarquant, en bon durkheimien, que la division du travail qui existe dans la gestion par projet, oscillant entre concurrence, conflit et coopération ne se coule pas dans une " hiérarchie directe et organisée "( p. 29).
Other books cited in the review are: 1) Françoise Benhamou, , L'économie du starsystème, Editions Odile Jacob, Paris, 2002. 2) Daniel Bell Les Contradictions culturelles du capitalisme, Paris, Puf,(1979). 3) Carlo Vercellone, Sommes-nous sortis du capitalisme industriel? La Dispute, Paris 2003; 4) L¹immatériel d'André Gorz, Galilée, 2003.5) M. Lazzarato , Puissance de l¹Invention, les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, le Seuil, 2002. 6) Pekka Himanen, L¹Éthique hacker et l¹esprit de l¹ère de l¹information,Exils, 2001. 7) Robert Castel, L¹insécurité sociale, La République des idées, LeSeuil, Paris 2003

by Alexander Bard (Author), Jan Soderqvist (Author) Financial Times Prentice Hall; 1st edition (November 7, 2002)

This is an older book, which I haven’t read (only commentaries and critiques when it appeared), and which challenges the egalitarian ethos which I see as emerging from P2P developments. I find such books problematical, because, while there are certainly new inequalities emerging from the networked field, and whom Jeremy Rifkin has already described in his Age of Access, there are here seen in isolation from the context of cognitive capitalism (as if capital itself no longer plays a role as a more fundamental inequality). But in another sense this crowd is also very much extreme libertarian and ‘market fundamentalist’ in orientation (despite their rhetoric about capitalism breaking down), and typical for a certain brand of cyber-entrepreneurs, who in my opinion, are quick to exploit the creative enthousiasm of the knowledge workers in their employ, and exhibit a gung ho attitude based on the ethos ‘strong individuals’ who can make it into current net society and therefore disdain the others who can’t. What is lacking in this hyper-libertarian ethos, in any feeling of community, of solidarity, of compassion even, it’s all about the survival of the fittest. This feeling expressed here is based on hearing a lecture by Soderqvist in Brussels.

From Amazon: “In Netocracy, Bard and Soderqvist show that the transparent and non-hierarchical society proclaimed by the enthusiastic early Internet pioneers is one of the greatest myths of the information age. Future society will be hierarchical. It will be divided—but not along lines of wealth and academic merit. Capitalist structures will be broken down.”

The Success of Open Source, Berkeley professor Steven Weber- review by Joshua Daniel Franklin , in SlashDot.

“The first part of The Success of Open Source is a historical case study that examines the origins and social development of the Open Source community. It begins with Unix and hacker culture. For those who have read Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Peter Salus' A Quarter Century of UNIX, there is little new material here, but Weber offers a new and interesting perspective on the events. For example, he offers the insight that "hacker culture" existed before widespread network connectivity, drawing into question whether cheap bandwidth is really essential.
From there, he covers the development of the BSDs, Apache, and Linux, focusing again on social structures. He describes diverse events such as the messy expulsion of Theo de Raadt from the NetBSD core, the creation of Apache by an informal group of interested developers, and the establishment of Alan Cox as de facto Linux networking lieutenant. Weber draws from an impressive array of firsthand accounts, including mailing lists, websites, conference speeches, and personal interviews. I get some interesting trivia out of this, such as Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll (98). Unfortunately, since Weber's narrative is mainly topical, it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles. Other claims are close to flamebait, such as suggesting that Richard Stallman is an example of a "failed leader." (168)

For the second half of the book, Weber moves on to Explaining Open Source in the terms of his discipline, political economy. He sees two broad categories of principles to the Open Source process: Microfoundations, including individual motivations and the economic logic of the collective good; and Macro-Organization, solving the problems of coordination and complexity. (133) While I doubt each reader will catch every academic nuance in these chapters, Weber is thankfully sparing in his use of specialized vocabulary and writes his overall argument in clear, easy-to-follow logic.

This section also contains the most insightful observations in The Success of Open Source. While there are too many to list here, one is the concept of Open Source Software as antirival. As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage. Though Weber does not mention this in the text, one can see part of this principle in proprietary vendors' providing free downloads or turning their backs on rampant piracy. It also does not take a great leap of logic to see application of the antirival model to other fields such as music or academic research. As is customary in social science literature, Weber uses his conclusion to both recap his argument and to raise questions for future direction of research. What is the best organization method for property distribution, as opposed to the current methods based on exclusion? How can the Open Source production process be used effectively to improve prospects for the developing world? What is the best way for closed, hierarchical systems to interact with open, network-based ones? While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book, hopefully future work will examine these questions in depth. Though Open Source has been mentioned in many recent works, The Success of Open Source is the first academic book that focuses on the Open Source community as its object of study. It gives a readable, thought-provoking, and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means, making it an extremely valuable resource for those who want to engage and discuss these issues on an intellectual level. As Weber states, his positive, constructive outlook "may not be fully satisfying, but it's not a bad place to start."

http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?040510on_onlineonly01; http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040510ta_talk_surowiecki

Competition between companies, but cooperation within companies, that’s the best model, writes James Surowiecki, who argues that this is what has gone wrong with the intelligence agencies and the Enron/Worldcom debacles. The author will shortly publish a book, The Wisdom of Crowds.

Thus the above interview and article on teamwork contain interesting comments about postmodern corporate models, which decentralized corporations, made entities autonomous, and made them compete against each other, introducing internal competition by introducing market principles inside the company. Thus there is the old command and control model based on hierarchy, and the market pricing model. Many of the notorious bankruptcies and corruption cases of late, Enron and Worldcom come to mind, were organized according to this principle.

My own experience confirms this trend. When I worked at BP Nutrition, the corporate libraries had to become for-profit, and though my efforts to reform the library got me awards, it was part of an effort that reduced 90% of the workers from the process, and led to a wholesale ditching of books and archives, and thus of corporate memory and long-term insights. Though I had to play the game, I never deep-down agreed that library and knowledge could be successfully subsumed under pure market pricing. When I started working as marketing manager of USWeb/CKS, a fast growing internet consultancy, I remember that it was just impossible for us to share leads with the other country agencies as they would just call our customer and try to get it away from us. Can you imagine what kind of corporate atmosphere this kind of internal competition fosters.Then I moved to a large Telco still operating under the command and control model, but it wasn’t better: no innovation whatsoever, generalized manipulation of the reporting figures, the systematic making of wrong choices to aggrandize one’s own power base, etc.. I only know of one exception that I liked: Buckman Laboratories, a specialty chemicals company where the visionary director had introduced an internal network, as well as concrete measures that promoted cooperation, such as rewarding the authors of documents which were widely distributed. But it is my negative experiences in the business world which contributed to my final decision that social innovation could no longer be found in the business world, but outside of it, in the internet-enabled civil society.

At any rate, the following interview with James Surowiecki, talks about the different models, and also talks about collective intelligence, the ‘wisdom of crowds’,

Here’s a quote, whom I disagree with, since I do not believe that competion is a cure-all for everything, but that gives you an idea of what the book is about:

“You have a new book coming out, “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Talk a bit about its central thesis.

The central argument is that, under the right circumstances, groups are smarter than the smartest people within them. When it comes to problems that have a “real” answer—from something simple, like how many jelly beans are in a jar, to something more complex, like figuring out how likely a given horse is to win a horse race, to even the very complex, like figuring out, in 2002, the probability that Saddam Hussein would be out of power by April of 2003—the group’s collective answer is usually excellent. On any one problem, a few people may do better than the group, but over time it’s almost impossible to outperform it.

Is this intelligence-sharing notion—the idea that you can learn from larger numbers of colleagues, or from distant divisions, rather than focussing myopically on what's right in front of you—related to the book, either directly or obliquely?

It’s related to the book directly. The premise of the book is that, as it were, no one knows more than everyone. But you can take advantage of that only if there’s some way of putting all the different pieces of information together. The intelligence community doesn’t have that, and it’s a lot less intelligent than it would be otherwise.

Adam Smith said that society as a whole would benefit from corporate competition. Is society benefitting from corporate competition today? Or is this idea being applied—perversely or unknowingly—to society's detriment?

Well, I’m a big fan of corporate competition generally. To me, the example of what happens when you don’t have real competition is the Pinto. The American auto industry went from being the most dynamic and powerful in the world to making second- or even third-class cars because they were insulated from competition. And what changed that was the arrival of the Japanese and the Germans. I’m consistently amazed at the quality of products today, and that’s a direct result, I think, of competition. More broadly, I think that the kind of coöperation you can sustain inside an organization is impossible—and maybe not even desirable—at an economy-wide level. (opec, after all, coöperates and doesn’t compete, but that’s a bad thing for all of us.) So, in terms of the economy, I say, compete away. Inside organizations, it’s a different matter.”

Sometimes, you can read the same thing over and over, without truly ‘getting it’. It is only recently that I stepped out of my Cartesian presupposition of a subject living in a objective world. Reading John Heron’s participative cosmology in his book Sacred Science, was a first step. In it he describes, citing Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of perception, that reality is truly subjective-objective, knowledge is active, engages with, and is determined by, the ‘objects’ which it touches. Hence, the subject is not in fact separate, but both subject and object are constantly co-created by human consciousness, which is further more ‘always-already’ part of a human intersubjective field of language, and more generally, in a preverbal unity with the surrounding natural universe. Letting this realization percolate in human consciousness is a true ‘cognitive’ change, changing your basic philosophy of life. A more theoretical explanation of this paradigm change, has been published by Jorge Ferrer. The unique and radical importance of this work is really very well explained in the foreword by Richard Tarnas, himself the author of an excellent book on “The Passion of the Western Mind’. Though I have only read myself three extended essays presenting the main ideas of the book (as it is already out of print), in the journal ReVision, I can only agree with Tarnas that this is one of the major books of the decennium, despite its focus on the field of ‘transpersonal theory’.

- Revisioning Transpersonal Theory.A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. Jorge N. Ferrer. State University of New York Press, 2001

“Revolutions in human thought seldom take place in a single clean sweep: the initial breakthrough will retain from the old paradigmatic structure certain essential and usually unexamined assumptions that limit the success of the new breakthrough. We can now recognize a similar situation with respect to the paradigm shift initiated by transpersonal psychology. From its birth in the late 1960s with the seminal work of Abraham Maslow and Stanislav Grof, the transpersonal movement represented a profoundly liberating impulse, and in certain respects a revolutionary break from the past, within the field of psychology. Compared with the positivism and reductionism that had long dominated the field, transpersonal psychology's inclusion and validation of the spiritual dimension of human experience opened the modern psychological vision to a radically expanded universe of realities-Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary, esoteric and mystical, shamanic and therapeutic, ordinary and non-ordinary, human and cosmic. Spirituality was now recognized as not only an important focus of psychological theory and research but an essential foundation of psychological health and healing. Developing ideas and directions pioneered by William James and C.G. Jung, transpersonal psychology and theory began to address the great schism between religion and science that so deeply divided the modern sensibility.

But as the work of Jorge Ferrer now illuminates, the very circumstances of transpersonal psychology's origins, born as it was out of a modern science with philosophical roots in the Enlightenment, compelled the field to build its theoretical structures and foundations on inherited principles that - while crucial for its immediate success - gradually revealed themselves to be acutely problematic in the long term. With modernity's focus on the individual Cartesian subject as the starting point and foundation for any understanding of reality, with its pervasive assertion of the knowing subject's epistemic separation from an independent objective reality, and finally with the modern disenchantment of the external world of nature and the cosmos, it was virtually inevitable that transpersonal psychology would emerge in the form that it did: namely, with an overriding commitment to legitimate the spiritual dimension of existence by defending the empirical status of private, individual intrasubjective experiences of an independent and universal spiritual reality. With modern cosmology's voiding of any intrinsic spiritual meaning or structure in the publicly accessible external universe, empirical validation of a spiritual reality had to be via private and intrasubjective experience. And since experience of the ultimate spiritual reality was regarded as one shared by mystics of all ages, it was, like scientific truth, empirically replicable by anyone properly prepared to engage in the appropriate practices. In turn, this consensually validated supreme reality was seen as constituting a single absolute Truth which subsumed the diverse plurality of all possible cultural and spiritual perspectives within its ultimate unity. This was the essential transcendent Truth in which all religions at their mystical core ultimately converged. ----- Transpersonal psychology's commitment to such an epistemology and ontology certainly also reflected the powerful legacy of modern humanism and the longer Western humanistic tradition dating back to the Renaissance and earlier to ancient Greece, which exalted the sovereign value of the individual - of individual human experience, human potential, and self-actualization. Moreover, the expansive and intense private subjectivity of much psychedelic experience, a key factor in the philosophical transformation of a generation of transpersonal thinkers, played a critical role in strengthening transpersonal psychology's commitment to an inner empiricism. ----- Less obvious, though no less influential, was the great underlying drama of the modern Western self as it strove to emerge from its historical religious matrix, that is, to define itself autonomously and thus in some sense to disengage itself from Christianity, the dominant vessel of the West's spiritual impulse for the better part of two millennia. The leading figures in transpersonal psychology were all working within and reacting against a Western cultural tradition whose religious imagination had been deeply informed, and problematically dominated, by Christianity. The reasons for this tension were many and complex, but an antagonistic response-sometimes subtle, other times explicit - to the Judaeo-Christian legacy in the West was generally shared by the entire transpersonal community and the larger counterculture of which it was part, and this in turn influenced and encouraged its immense attraction to the spiritual riches of the East. But beyond the explicitly spiritual and religious dimension of this attitude, all the leaders of the transpersonal movement shared the larger background of the Enlightenment's historical struggle with the Christian religion for dominance in the modern world view.----- The Enlightenment impulse to privilege the universal truth of an objective reality - an unambiguous independent truth that could be reliably confirmed by direct experience and the appropriate experimental procedures, that transcended the diversity of various cultural and personal perspectives, that cleansed the mind of all subjective distortions and superstitious delusions, that demystified reality of all mythological baggage and anthropomorphic projections - this overriding impulse had effectively served the modern project of freeing modern thought from the perceived constrictions of a dogmatic Christianity. ----- But transpersonal psychology was now motivated by the same impulse in a new quest, focused this time not on the nature of the material world but on the nature of spirituality: namely, to free spirituality from its previous obligatory association with the now increasingly relativized Christian religion, yet also to free spirituality from its negation by modern science while remaining true to scientific principles of empiricist testing and validation. In turn, this quest was deeply affected by the widespread encounter with various Asian mystical practices and perspectives, usually removed from their complex cultural contexts and emphasizing a contemplative goal of nondual transcendence. The combined result of these several factors was transpersonal theory's commitment to a "perennial philosophy" which in essence privileged the same kind of truth in the psychospiritual world that the rationalist Enlightenment had privileged with respect to the physical world: an independent, impersonal, universal truth that transcended all subjective and cultural interpretations and that could be empirically verified with appropriate methodologies employed by an appropriate community of investigators. This perennialist Truth was the highest truth, superior to all others. It was a Truth exclusively capable of including and defining all other truths. ----- In a sense, the pioneers and leading theorists of transpersonal psychology had two aims. They wished to legitimate their new discipline and the ontological status of spirituality in the eyes of empirical science, the dominant force in the modern world view. Yet they equally sought to legitimate spirituality and their discipline in their own eyes, which required them to satisfy those standards and assumptions of empirical science that they themselves had internalized in the course of their own intellectual development. ----- The belief in an independent objective reality - whether spiritual or material - that could be empirically validated; the further conviction that this pre-given reality was ultimately single and universal, and that its deep structures could be described by progressively more accurate representations as the history of thought advanced; the corollary belief that on this basis, sharply bivalent assessments, either affirmative or rejecting, could be made of all "competing" spiritual and psychological perspectives, and that hierarchical rankings of religious traditions and mystical experiences as more or less evolved could thereby be established according to their relative accuracy in representing this independent reality: all these principles, derived from the scientific ideology of modernity, were carried forth into the transpersonal paradigm. And in being carried forth, they at once helped legitimate the paradigm and yet increasingly began to engender internal tensions, theoretical incoherencies, and even internecine conflicts. ----- In practice - on the ground level, as it were, in its lived reality - the transpersonal tent from the beginning was an extraordinarily embracing, tolerant, richly pluralistic community of seekers and scholars, students and teachers. The periodic large gatherings around the world of the International Transpersonal Association, founded by Grof in the 1970s, were exceptionally encompassing events, each one a combination of wide-ranging psychology conference, new age cultural festival, and something resembling the World Parliament of Religions. Few gatherings could have been more fertilely dialogical. A similar ethos pervaded the ongoing seminars, symposia, and workshops at Esalen Institute, for many years an epicenter of the transpersonal world. ----- But at the theoretical level, in books, journals, and graduate classrooms, the most energetic and widely discussed conceptual frameworks in transpersonal theory were marked by an increasingly intense commitment to a single absolute universal truth, stringent bivalent logic, and the construction of all-subsuming metasystems that confidently rejected or affirmed particular spiritual traditions and philosophical perspectives according to specific abstract criteria and ranked them in ascending evolutionary sequences. This in turn brought forth increasingly heated controversies and conflicts, as representatives of an enormous range of diverse traditions and perspectives - indigenous and shamanic, esoteric and gnostic, Romantic and Neo-Romantic, Jungian and archetypal, feminist and ecofeminist, as well as Wiccan and Goddess spirituality, Buddhism, nature mysticism, Christian and Jewish and Islamic mysticism, anthroposophy, American Transcendentalism, deep ecology, systems theory, evolutionary cosmology, Whiteheadian process theology, Bohmian physics, and many others - all asserted the intrinsic worth of their positions against theoretical superstructures by which they felt marginalized, devalued, and misrepresented. The situation was further complicated by the fact that transpersonal psychology's own data - the findings of modern consciousness research, experiential therapies, psychedelic reports, spiritual emergencies, research in non-ordinary states of consciousness, field anthropology, thanatology, the reports of mystics across diverse cultures and eras - suggested a far more complex picture than the leading theoretical systems could accommodate. By the 1990s, a kind of civil war had emerged, engulfing the field in controversy and schism. ----- It is this immensely complex and conflicted situation, in all its conceptual intricacy, that Jorge Ferrer's Revisioning Transpersonal Theory brilliantly confronts, diagnoses, and recontextualizes. This is a profoundly liberating book. Ferrer has assimilated all the major works and ideas of the field, and thought through the difficult issues at stake. He has integrated the most recent developments in fields that had heretofore been inadequately engaged by transpersonal theory - interreligious dialogue, comparative mysticism, hermeneutics and poststructuralism, post-Kuhnian philosophy of science - fields acutely relevant to the current debates. And perhaps especially important, he has explored deeply a range of transformative practices, spiritual paths, and spiritually informed social action that have brought crucial dimensions of embodiment to the intellectual and spiritual issues. ----- I will leave it to the reader to enjoy the unfolding drama of Ferrer's masterful analysis as he lays the groundwork for resolving the crisis of transpersonal theory. In essence, Ferrer has comprehended the most valuable insights of the postmodern mind and integrated them into the transpersonal vision, while fully transcending the dogmatic relativism and compulsively fragmenting skepticism that afflicted some earlier postmodern perspectives (limitations rooted in that hidden secular reductionism which served as postmodernity's own unconscious mortgage to the modern). The underlying project of the leading transpersonal metatheories has explicitly been to integrate modern science with premodern religion. To achieve this, numerous ad hoc theoretical modifications were required to explain the many resulting anomalies and incoherencies, blunt the diverse criticisms, and patch up the attempted supersynthesis. These modifications usually drew on various postmodern ideas that were helpful for meeting the specific problems at issue, but in the long run proved to be essentially epicyclic corrections for an overall strategy that could not do justice to the complex reality it sought to explain. ----- Ferrer, by contrast, has absorbed the full meaning of the postmodern turn at its deepest and irreplaceable core: He has articulated a radically participatory and pluralistic understanding of spiritual realities, spiritual practices, and spiritual knowledge. He critiques the intrasubjective empiricism imported from empiricist science that has dominated the field and colonized it with inapt and self-defeating requirements for replication, testing, and falsification. And he affirms the validity of a multiplicity of spiritual liberations, in which various spiritual traditions and practices cultivate and "enact," bring forth, through co-creative participation in a dynamic and indeterminate spiritual power, a plurality of authentic spiritual ultimates. ----- With this crucial insight into the participatory, enactive, and pluralistic nature of spiritual truth, the transpersonal field frees itself to enter into a new world of openness to the Mystery of being that is its ground, accompanied by a newly respectful and fruitful dialogue between diverse religions, metaphysical perspectives, and spiritual practices. By cutting the Gordian knot that has invisibly bound transpersonal theory to the Enlightenment like an outlived umbilical cord, the transpersonal field can open to new horizons, its vision no longer so riven by futile and too often intolerant, undialogical debate. ----- I salute Ferrer's emphatic affirmation of the Mystery with which all transpersonal and spiritual inquiry is concerned, the boundless creative freedom of the ultimate ground, its liberating defiance of all intellectual schemas that claim to theorize the whole of reality. And this affirmation is achieved, not simply by apodictic declaration, but by rigorous epistemological analysis of the relevant transpersonal theories, an equally meticulous comparison of crosscultural religious and mystical reports, and an incisive critique of contemporary spiritual practice. It is a pleasure to see here a powerful mind employed fully in service of opening to the Mystery of existence, rather than attempting to contain, categorize, and rank, in service of the needs of an overarching system. ----- This is in many ways a very simple book. It certainly is extremely clear, written with an intelligent and patient care to make every point transparent to the reader, with every position at issue represented with conscientious accuracy, and with each possible objection or alternative lucidly addressed. Each successive chapter brings greater penetration into the field's central problems and greater freedom from their constraints. One finishes this book with a clearer mind and a more spacious vision than one begins it. ----- To engage transpersonal discourse at the level required to write this book, one must have done an incalculable amount of close reading and deep thinking, on an extremely broad range of topics and in a wide range of disciplines. And because it is this particular field - involving not only epistemology and psychology but spirituality and religion - there is an even greater potential in the process of such an accomplishment for spiritual inflation. ----- But Ferrer demonstrates in this book the very qualities of scholarship and dialogue that best reflect the character of his spiritual vision - the care with which he describes both his own positions and those of others, the openness to being corrected, the ability to be critical without sarcasm or rancor, the setting forth of opposing ideas in a manner that scrupulously reflects how their exponents themselves would articulate them. The consistent priority is clearly to seek and serve truth, rather than advance or preserve one's own position and reputation at others' expense. ----- Transpersonal realities can never be adequately or accurately described by intellectually confident assessments and rankings of the multiplicity of humanity's spiritual paths and perspectives measured against a single pre-given independent universal Reality. They can be approached, rather, only by a much more subtly intelligent and more heartful dialogical engagement with the Mystery that is source of all - hence, by a dialogical engagement with each other in respectful openness to the diversity of wisdom's self-disclosures, and a dialogical engagement with one's interior being and with the cosmos itself, in reverent openness to the irreducible depths of its mystery, intelligence, and power. Such knowledge is an act of the heart as much as it is an act of the mind, the two inextricably united. ----- We can perhaps now recognize that great temptation to which our field temporarily succumbed, seen in certain stages of the spiritual and intellectual quest, a temptation that any brilliant spiritually informed mind may encounter: to attempt intellectually to master the Mystery, to overpower its power, to overcome its free spontaneity, to show how everything fits one's system, to avoid the psychological fears and anxieties of confronting the larger Unknown, that which can never be mastered. This book provides the theoretical matrix for honoring this recognition. It honors that Spirit which blows like the wind, "where it wills." ----- As the transpersonal field moves to an understanding of human spirituality as more profoundly encompassing and participatory, many have begun to see the very word "transpersonal" as needing to be addressed, and perhaps fundamentally redefined. For as we integrate more fully the amplitude and immanence of the sacred, we better discern that spiritual power moving in and through the human person in all her and his living, embodied, situated specificity: psychological and physical, gendered, relational, communal, cultural and historical, ecological and cosmic. In this understanding, "trans" recovers its original Latin larger range of meanings - signifying not only beyond but also across, through, pervading; so as to change, transform; occurring by way of. Here "transpersonal" multivalently acknowledges the sacred dimension of life dynamically moving beyond as well as within, through, and by way of the human person in a manner that is mutually transformative, complexly creative, opening to a fuller participation in the divine creativity that is the human person and the ever unfolding cosmos. It is precisely this spiritual dynamism in the human person embedded in a spiritually alive cosmos that empowers, and challenges, the human community's participatory co-creation of spiritual realities, including new realities still to unfold. ----- If the founding works of transpersonal psychology by Maslow and Grof constituted its declaration of independence, then this book may well be seen as its emancipation proclamation, its "new birth in freedom." For here transpersonal theory is liberated from that mortgage to the past, those constraining assumptions and principles inherited from its Enlightenment and modern scientific origins. As revolutionary and profound a force as transpersonal theory has been over the past three decades, it has in a fundamental way been working inside a conceptual box. It has been subtly constrained by epistemological and metaphysical blinders that have unconsciously restricted its vision, thereby engendering numerous seemingly irresolvable problems, distortions, and conflicts. Only with the recognition of these inhibiting assumptions could the full emancipatory potential of the original transpersonal breakthrough finally be fulfilled. ----- If I may draw again on the Copernican analogy, transpersonal theory in its first thirty years, after freeing itself from a kind of geocentric/egocentric materialist reductionism dominant in mainstream psychology, tended to constellate itself around the transcendent Sun of perennialism as the absolute and single fixed center of the spiritual universe. Only with time has it become apparent that we live in a much vaster, more interesting, radically pluralistic world, an omnicentered cosmos with innumerable suns and stars around which are constellated multiple universes of meaning. These meanings are not pre-given and independent objective realities but rather are participatively and co-creatively brought forth out of an indeterminate and dynamic matrix of spiritual mystery. -----
We owe a debt of gratitude to Ferrer for his courage in bringing forth this work, though in a sense it reflects the maturation of the entire field, of the wider transpersonal community. I stand in admiration before the magnitude and depth of thought and experience, dialogue and reflection that has taken place within the transpersonal field to permit the possibility of this work being written at the present time. For at a deep level, the transpersonal community itself has brought forth this book: As Ferrer would himself be the first and most enthusiastic to declare, it is not the work of one person - though we owe so much to the person who articulated it.

tantrism (http://www.leavingsiddhayoga.net/caldwell.sarah.pdf):


“Dear Michel: I have read with great interest the Sarah Caldwell piece about leaving Siddha Yoga.
Victor and Victoria Trimondi give an excellent expose of the androcentric exploitation of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism in their e-book The Shadow of the Dalai Lama. In the postscript they point to the possibility of an authentic creative polarity beyond the misogynistic limits of Tantrism See www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Postscript.htm The home page for their e-book is www.trimondi.de - another link I commend - their work helps to clear the way for peer to peer spirituality in gender relations.”

We can indeed confirm that these texts are absolutely remarkable reading. Here is the table of contents for full access to the book: http://www.trimondi.de/SDLE/Contents.htm

Here is summary information on the book referred to and on the public reaction to it:

In March 1999 “The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism” by Victor und Victoria Trimondi appeared in Germany. The book looks in detail at the cultic background of Tibetan Buddhism and its clerical leader, the Dalai Lama. In this original work of analysis, interpretation and critique, the authors not only provide surprising, previously largely ignored factual information; they also undertake a philosophically well-grounded interpretation of Lamaism, rendering the Tibetan-Buddhist worldview understandable for Western readers through a comparison with European religious traditions. V. and V. Trimondi have succeeded in combining history, politics, religion and psychology in an impressive cultural-historical presentation.

Of the book’s reception, the Berner Zeitung (a Swiss newspaper) reported that THE SHADOW OF THE DALAI LAMA "struck like a thunderbolt". To date (Oct. 2000) the work has been reviewed in over 200 different media outlets. Opinions have alternated between pro and contra, but virtually no review remains unemotional. Despite numerous initial calls for a boycott by the pro-Lamaist wing, the book has led to a fierce, ever-expanding discussion, and has in the meantime become a standard work on the critical examination of Lamaism and the metapolitics of the Dalai Lama.
In the German-speaking world, the book by Victor und Victoria Trimondi appeared in the middle of an already begun reconsideration of the Dalai Lama and his religious system. In 1998, the Scottish author June Campbell’s book (Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism, Athlone Press) had appeared, in which she reported on the system’s secret sexual practices and the sexual abuse of women, along with two explosive film reports on German — ARD (Panorama) — and Swiss— SFR (10 vor 10) — television, about the human rights violations associated with the suppression of the Tibetan Shugden religious community by the XIV Dalai Lama. These fuelled intensive discussion and opened the gateway for a critical debate. Nonetheless, THE SHADOW OF THE DALAI LAMA caused quite a furor when it appeared, and was not without its successors. Within a few months several other books with a critical content came onto the market. There was Colin Goldner’s Dalai Lama. Fall eines Gottkönigs [Dalai Lama: The Fall of a God-King] (Allibri Verlag), likewise a critical title, which confirmed factual material. The theology professor Michael von Brück picked up essential facts from the Trimondis and wrote a critical book on the topic himself (Religion und Politik im tibetischen Buddhismus [Religion and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism], Kösel Verlag). Then the former Buddhist, Martin Kamphuis, told of his disappointing experiences with the Lamaist system (Ich war Buddhist [I was a Buddhist], Pattloch Verlag).


Here is an extended quote, which also puts the issue of gender domination in tantrism in the context of feminist theories of the subject:

Nevertheless, as we have demonstrated, this harmonious primordial image is misused in tantric rituals by an androcentric caste of monks for the ends of spiritual and secular power. We refrain from describing once more the sexual magic exploitation in Vajrayana, and would instead like to turn to a philosophical question raised by this topic, namely the relationship between the ONE (as the male principle) and the OTHER (as the female principle).

Since Friedrich Hegel, the OTHER has become a key topic of philosophical discussion. The absolute ONE or absolute mind is unable to tolerate any OTHER besides itself. Only when the OTHER is completely integrated into the ONE, only when it is “suspended” in the ONE is the way of the mind complete. For then nature (the OTHER) has become mind (the ONE). This is one way of succinctly describing one of the fundamental elements of Hegelian philosophy.

In Vajrayana terminology, the absolute ONE that tolerates no OTHER beyond himself is the androgynous ADI BUDDHA. The OTHER (the feminine) surrenders its autonomy to the hegemony of the ONE (the masculine). It is destroyed with one word. Yet the absolute ONE of the ADI BUDDHA is radically questioned by the existence of an OTHER (the feminine); his claims to infinity, cosmocentricity, omnipotence, and divinity are threatened. “All is ONE or all is the ADI BUDDHA” is a basic maxim of the tantric way. For this reason the OTHER frightens and intimidates the ONE. The Buddhist Ken Wilber (a proponent of the ADI BUDDHA principle) quotes the Upanishads in this connection: Wherever the OTHER is, there is dread (Wilber, 1990, p. 174) — and himself admits that everywhere where there is an OTHER, there is also fear (Wilber, 1990, p. 280).

As already indicated, behind this existential fear of the OTHER lies a fundamental gender issue. This has been taken up and developed primarily by French feminists. In the “otherness” (autruité) of the female Simone de Beauvoir saw a highly problematic fixing of the woman created by the androcentric persective. Men wanted to see women as the OTHER in order to be able to control them. The woman was forced to define her identity via the perspective of the man. Beauvoir’s successors, however, such as the femininst Luce Irigaray, have lent “gender difference” and AUTRUITÉ (otherness) a highly positive significance and have made it the central topic of their feminine philosophy. Otherness here all but becomes a female world unable to be grasped by either the male perspective or male reason. It evades any kind of masculine fixation. Female subjectivity is inaccessible for the male.

It is precisely the OTHERNESS which lets women preserve their autonomy. They thus escape being objectified by men (the male subject) and develop their own subjectivity (the female subject). Irigaray very clearly articulates how existing religions block women’s path to a self-realization of their own: “She must always be for men, available for their transcendence” (quoted by June Campbell, 1996, p. 155) — i.e., as Sophia, prajna, as the “white virgin”, as a “wisdom dakini” (inana mudra). In the male consciousness she lacks a subjectivity of her own, and is a blank screen (shunyata) onto which the man projects his own imaginings.

Yet the autonomy of the OTHER does not need to be experienced as separation, fragmentation, lack, or as an alienating element. It can just as well serve as the opposite, as the prerequisite for the union of two subjects, complementarity, or copula. The masculine and the feminine can behave in completely different ways toward one another, either as a duality (of mutually exclusive opposites = annihilation of the OTHER) or as a polarity (mutually complentary opposites = encounter with the OTHER). It is almost a miracle that the sexes are fundamentally permitted to meet one another in love without having to renounce their autonomy.

Buddhist Tantrism, however, is not about such an encounter between man and woman, but purely the question of how the yogi (as the masculine principle of the ONE) can integrate the OTHER (the feminine principle) within himself and render it useful by drawing off its gynergy. Occult feminism involves the same phenomenon in reverse: how can the yogini (here the feminine principle of the ONE) appropriate the androenergy of the man (here the OTHER) so as to win gynandric power.

The appropriation of the OTHER (the goddess) by the ONE (the ADI BUDDHA) is the core concept of Buddhist Tantrism. This makes it a phenomenon which, at this level of generality, also shapes Western cultures and religions: “Male religiosity masks an appropriation,” writes Luce Irigaray. “This severs the relationship to the natural universe, its simplicity is perverted. Certainly, this religiousness symbolizes a social universe organized by men. But this organization is based on a sacrifice — of nature, of the gendered body, especially that of the woman. It impels a spirituality cut off from its natural roots and its surroundings. It can thus not bring humanity to perfection. Spiritualization, socialization, cultivation require that we set out from what is there. The patriarchal system does not do this because it seeks to obliterate the foundations upon which it is based” (Irigaray, 1991, p. 33).

The solution to the riddle of its mysteries that Tantrism poses is obvious. It can only involve the union of the two poles, not their domination of one another. On its own the (masculine) spirit is not sufficient to become “whole”, instead nature and spirit, emotions and reason, logos and eros, woman and man, god and goddess, a masculine and a feminine Buddha as two autonomous beings must wed mystically (as yab and yum, yin and yang) as two subjects that fuse together into a WE. The ADI BUDDHA of the Kalachakra Tantra, however, is a divine SUBJECT (a SUPER EGO) that tries to consume the OTHER (the goddess). Not until ONE SUBJECT forms a copula with ANOTHER SUBJECT can a truly new dimension (WE) be entered: the great WE in which both egos, the masculine and the feminine, are truly “suspended”, truly “preserved”, and truly “transcended”. Perhaps it is this WE that is the cosmic secret to be discovered in the profoundest sections of the tantras, and not the ADI BUDDHA.

For in WE all the polarities of the universe fuse, subjectivity and objectivity, rule and servitude, union and division. The unio mystica with the partner dissolves both the individual and the transpersonal subjectivity (the human ego and the divine ego). Both poles, the masculine and the feminine, experience their spiritual, psychic and physical unity as intersubjectivity, as exchange, as WE. They join into a higher dimension without destroying one another. The mystic WE thus forms a more encompassing quality of experience than the ADI BUDDHA’s mystic EGO which seeks to swallow the OTHER (the goddess).

Were man and woman to understand themselves as the cosmic center, as god and goddess — as the tantric texts proclaim — were they to experience themselves together as a religious authority, then the androgynous guru in his role as the supreme god of “the mysteries of gendered love” would vanish. In an essay on tantric practices, the Indologist Doninger O’Flaherty describes several variants on androgyny and supplements these — not without a trace of irony — with an additional “androgynous” model which is basically not a model at all. “A third psychological androgyne, less closely tied to any particular doctrine, is found not in a single individual but in two: the man and the woman who join in perfect love, Shakespeare’s beast with two backs. This is the image of ecstatic union, another metaphor for the mystic realization of union with godhead. This is the romantic ideal of complete merging, one with the other, so that each experiences the other’s joy, not knowing whose is the hand that caresses or whose the skin that is caressed. In this state, the man and the woman in tantric ritual experience each other’s joy and pain. This is the divine hierogamy, and, in its various manifestations — as yab–yum, yin and yang, animus and anima — it is certainly the most widespread of androgynous concepts” (O’Flaherty, 1982, p. 292)”.

Robert Axtell andJoshua Epstein

From : http://www.brook.edu/press/books/artifsoc.htm
How do social structures and group behaviors arise from the interaction of individuals? In this groundbreaking study, Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell approach this age-old question with cutting-edge computer simulation techniques. Such fundamental collective behaviors as group formation, cultural transmission, combat, and trade are seen to "emerge" from the interaction of individual agents following simple local rules.
In their computer model, Epstein and Axtell begin the development of a "bottom up" social science. Their program, named Sugarscape, simulates the behavior of artificial people (agents) located on a landscape of a generalized resource (sugar). Agents are born onto the Sugarscape with a vision, a metabolism, a speed, and other genetic attributes. Their movement is governed by a simple local rule: "look around as far as you can; find the spot with the most sugar; go there and eat the sugar." Every time an agent moves, it burns sugar at an amount equal to its metabolic rate. Agents die if and when they burn up all their sugar. A remarkable range of social phenomena emerge. For example, when seasons are introduced, migration and hibernation can be observed. Agents are accumulating sugar at all times, so there is always a distribution of wealth.
Next, Epstein and Axtell attempt to grow a "proto-history" of civilization. It starts with agents scattered about a twin-peaked landscape; over time, there is self-organization into spatially segregated and culturally distinct "tribes" centered on the peaks of the Sugarscape. Population growth forces each tribe to disperse into the sugar lowlands between the mountains. There, the two tribes interact, engaging in combat and competing for cultural dominance, to produce complex social histories with violent expansionist phases, peaceful periods, and so on. The proto-history combines a number of ingredients, each of which generates insights of its own. One of these ingredients is sexual reproduction. In some runs, the population becomes thin, birth rates fall, and the population can crash. Alternatively, the agents may over-populate their environment, driving it into ecological collapse.
When Epstein and Axtell introduce a second resource (spice) to the Sugarscape and allow the agents to trade, an economic market emerges. The introduction of pollution resulting from resource-mining permits the study of economic markets in the presence of environmental factors.
Growing Artificial Societies is also available in CD-ROM format which includes about fifty animations that develop the scenarios described in the text.
This study is part of the 2050 Project, a joint venture of the Santa Fe Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution. The project is an international effort to identify conditions for a sustainable global system in the middle of the next century and to design policy actions to help achieve such a system.
Robert L. Axtell is a research associate in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program. They are both members of the Santa Fe Institute. Joshua M. Epstein is senior fellow in the Brookings Foreign Policy Studies program and teaches at Princeton University. He is author of Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (1987). The Calculus of Conventional War (1985), and The 1987 Defense Budget and The 1988 Defense Budget.

Comment by Ron Purser,

“The cultural significance of cyberspace, the Internet, virtual reality, and computer-mediated communications goes far beyond the fact that they are innovative technological devices. Indeed, these new information technologies are embedded in, and byproducts of, a much larger social, cultural, and scientific milieu. The evolution of consciousness can be viewed as a history of the shifts in the way human cultures have ordered and represented their worlds. Historically, the emergence of new technologies often provides the base for profound changes in the structure of the self, as well as radical alterations in the collective field of perception. David Lowe, (1982) in his study, The History of Bourgeois Perception, argues that perception is shaped by a collective interplay of factors. Communication media, one of the main factors in Lowe’s theory, acts to frame and filter the way we perceive the world. Basing much of his theory on the work of Walter Ong, Lowe traces shifts in culture that correspond to changes in media: from orality to chirograpgy in the Middle Ages; from chirography to typography in the Renaissance; from typograpy to photography in bourgeois society; and from photography to cinema and television in the modern world. We now stand at the brink of another profound cultural shift, moving from mass communication to interactive digital media—what Pierre Levy refers to as a process of virtualization. The question that will be answered in the next few decades is whether virtualization will be actualized as an enabling technology for the evolution of consciousness, or whether it will operate as a hypermodern detour, throwing us deeper into a cultural crisis, amplifying personal and collective fragmentation, feeding regressive drives, and prolonging our experience in a deficient phase of rationality. “

http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/

“Americans continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. But the truly historic migration is from the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs, to the suburbs of suburbia. From New Hampshire down to Georgia, across Texas to Arizona and up through California, you now have the booming exurban sprawls that have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities and now float in a new space far beyond them. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh has declined by 8 percent since 1980, but as people spread out, the amount of developed land in the Pittsburgh area increased by nearly 43 percent. The population of Atlanta increased by 22,000 during the 90's, but the expanding suburbs grew by 2.1 million. The geography of work has been turned upside down. Jobs used to be concentrated in downtowns. But the suburbs now account for more rental office space than the cities in most of the major metro areas of the country except Chicago and New York. In the Bay Area in California, suburban Santa Clara County alone has five times as many of the region's larger public companies as San Francisco. Ninety percent of the office space built in America by the end of the 1990's was built in suburbia, much of it in far-flung office parks stretched along the Interstates.
In these new, exploding suburbs, the geography, the very landscape of life, is new and unparalleled. In the first place, there are no centers, no recognizable borders to shape a sense of geographic identity. Throughout human history, most people have lived around some definable place -- a tribal ring, an oasis, a river junction, a port, a town square. But in exurbia, each individual has his or her own polycentric nodes -- the school, the church and the office park. Life is different in ways big and small.

At the same time the suburbs were sprawling, they were getting more complicated and more interesting, and they were going quietly berserk. When you move through suburbia -- from the old inner-ring suburbs out through the most distant exurbs -- you see the most unexpected things: lesbian dentists, Iranian McMansions, Korean megachurches, outlaw-biker subdevelopments, Orthodox shtetls with Hasidic families walking past strip malls on their way to shul. When you actually live in suburbia, you see that radically different cultural zones are emerging, usually within a few miles of one another and in places that are as architecturally interesting as a piece of aluminum siding. That's because in the age of the great dispersal, it becomes much easier to search out and congregate with people who are basically like yourself. People are less tied down to a factory, a mine or a harbor. They have more choice over which sort of neighborhood to live in. Society becomes more segmented, and everything that was once hierarchical turns granular.

David Brooks is a Times columnist. His new book, ''On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense,'' from which this essay is adapted, will be published next month by Simon & Schuster.

http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/creativeeurope_page370.aspx ; http://www.catalytix.biz/acrobat/vol1issue5.pdf

Found in Demos, a center-left UK think thank:

By creating the widest possible income inequality, that’s how, argues Creative Class author Richard Florida, who has developed an Inequality Index to prove it. Examining city-regions and countries, he concludes that old Europe and the US are falling behind northern Europe and the UK. I’ll let the reader be the judge if northern Europe belongs to the mos unequal regions of the world. However, the author has an explanation for this surprising finding, and it has to do with a new division of labour nurtured by this creative class.

Fortunately, his other finding is that “this new 'creative class' wanted to live in open and tolerant places. Tolerant societies are able to attract talented people who contribute to technological innovation.”

For more left of center political debate, see the Demos homepage and the OpenDemocracy debates at http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy_and_power/index.jsp ; I used to appreciate the latter site, but it seems to have become a locus for politically correct left-liberal thinking, you won’t find anything surprising that you cannot see on mainstream public TV.

- The Common Good as a response to globalisation
http://www.ceim.uqam.ca/biencommun/rapport%20du%20colloque.pdf

A synthesis of a November 2001 colloqium in Quebec by the Centre d’Etudes Internationales et Mondialisation. Full text of contributions available in the book below.

Book: Le bien commun comme réponse politique à la mondialisationSous la direction de Christian Deblock et Olivier Delas 2003, 584 pages; aux éditions Bruylant

HEBER SUFFRIN, Claire ; HEBER SUFFRIN, Marc Desclée De Brouwer , 1992, 319 p. L'histoire, l'aventure de cette idée "d'échange de savoir" sont présentées et analysées ici. Les savoirs, parfois barrières entre les hommes, peuvent devenir de formidables multiplicateurs de lien social, si au lieu de les retenir, on les échange.

10. Understanding the new mentalities of play

http://www.playfulworld.com
To understand emerging forms of awareness, it is important to look at how toys are shaping the expectations and mentalities of the new emerging generations of childrens. Investigating this is what Mark Pesce’s book is about. “A child born on the first day of the new Millennium will live an entire lifetime in a world undreamt of just a generation ago. As much as we might have tried to speculate upon the shape of things to come, the twenty-first century arrives just as unformed as a newborn.
When a child enters the world, it knows nearly nothing of the universe beyond itself. With mouth, then eyes, and finally, hands, it reaches out to discover the character of the surrounding world. Over the course of time, that child will discover its Mother - the source of life - and, sometime later, its Father. But in the first days after birth, the child will be presented with rattles, mobiles, mirrors and noisy stuffed animals that will become its constant companions. Our children, in nearly every imaginable situation, are accompanied by toys.
It has been this way for a very long time. We can trace the prehistoric sharpened stick - undoubtedly the first tool - to the sticks children still love to play with today. Over the 5500 years of recorded history, forward from Sumer and Egypt, toys have a presence both charming and enlightening, for we have learned that toys not only help to form the imaginations of our children, but also reflect the cultural imagination back upon us. The ancient Maya, who thrived across Mesoamerica thirteen centuries ago, never developed the wheel for transportation - already in use for some seven thousand years in Mesopotamia - yet employed it in toys. The Mayan world-view - based in circles and cycles of sky and earth, brought them the wheel as a toy, a pocket universe which reflected the structure of the whole cosmos.
All of our toys, for all of known time, perform the same role of reducing the complex universe of human culture into forms that children can grasp. I am not saying that children are simple, unable to apprehend the complex relationships which form cultures, rather, that toys help the child to guide itself into culture, playgrounds where rehearsals for reality can proceed without constraint or self-consciousness.
These points have been made before, but have gained unusual currency over the last few years, as the character of our toys has begun to change, reflecting a new imagining of ourselves and the world we live in. Somewhere in the time between Project Apollo and the Mars Pathfinder we learned how to make the world react to our presence within it, sprinkling some of our intelligence into the universe-at-large in much the same way a chef seasons a fine sauce. Our toys, touched by fairy dust, have come alive, like Pinocchio; some - like the incredibly popular Furby - simulate ever-more-realistic personalities.
Although the Furby seems to have come from nowhere to capture the hearts of children worldwide, in reality, it incorporates everything we already know about how the future will behave. The world reacts to us - interacts with us - at a growing level of intelligence and flexibility. A century ago people marveled at the power and control of the electric light, which turned the night into day and ushered in a twenty-four hour world. Today we and our children are amazed by a synthetic creature possessing a dim image of our own consciousness and announcing the advent of a playful world, where the gulf between wish and reality collapses to produce a new kind of creativity.
Toys can serve as points of departure for another voyage of exploration, a search for the world of our children's expectations. As much as a spear or wheel or astronaut figurine ever shaped a child's view of the world, these toys - because they now react to us - tell us that our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days. Fortunately, we are ready for that challenge. Just as the creative world of children has become manipulable, programmable and mutable, the entire fabric of the material world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation. That, at essence, is the theme of this book, because where our children are already going, we look to follow.
In the evolving relationship between imagination and reality, toys show us how we teach the ways of this new world to our children. Their toys tell them everything they need to know about where they are going, providing them the opportunity to develop a mind-set which will make the radical freedom offered in such a world an attractive possibility. Many of us - "older" people - will find that freedom chaotic, discomforting - if not downright disorienting, and it will be up to our children to teach us how to find our way in a world we were not born into.
All around us, the world is coming alive, infused with information and capability; this is the only reality for our children, and it speaks louder than any lesson taught in any school, because the lesson is repeated - reinforced - with every button's touch. But it is up to us to rise to the challenge of a playful world, to finish the work of culture and change the nature of reality. It might seem, even after all of this, to be nothing more than a dream; but this is a book about dreams made real. So, follow on, as we trace a path through a world that is rising to meet us...”

John Arquila and David Ronfeldt (editors)
Rand Corporation

Arquila and Ronfeldt were the first to coin the term "netwar", and to explore a non-hierarchized, decentralized mode of combat.
This book is a collection of essays by various authors around this concept.

Extract from the book's summary :

Netwar is the lower-intensity, societal-level counterpart to our earlier,
mostly military concept of cyberwar. Netwar has a dual nature, like
the two-faced Roman god Janus, in that it is composed of conflicts
waged, on the one hand, by terrorists, criminals, and ethnonationalist
extremists; and by civil-society activists on the other. What distinguishes
netwar as a form of conflict is the networked organizational
structure of its practitioners—with many groups actually being leaderless
—and the suppleness in their ability to come together quickly in
swarming attacks. The concepts of cyberwar and netwar encompass a
new spectrum of conflict that is emerging in the wake of the information
revolution.
This volume studies major instances of netwar that have occurred
over the past several years and finds, among other things, that netwar
works very well. Whether the protagonists are civil-society activists or
"uncivil-society" criminals and terrorists, their netwars have generally
been successful. In part, the success of netwar may be explained by
its very novelty—much as earlier periods of innovation in military affairs
have seen new practices triumphant until an appropriate response
is discovered. But there is more at work here: The network
form of organization has reenlivened old forms of licit and illicit activity,
posing serious challenges to those—mainly the militaries, constabularies,
and governing officials of nation states—whose duty is to
cope with the threats this new generation of largely nonstate actors
poses."

This book, like all the publications of Rand Corporation, may be read online for free at :
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1382/