Occupy Wall Street

[Tinker]

[Alph]

[Tinker]

[Alph]

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

Glad you brought up Bucky Fuller, because this is probably the best way to explain the organization of OWS.

[Tinker]

But yes Alph, you are probably right that we will fail at the goals you think we have, since it's becoming clearer and clearer that you don't really have any clue what is actually happening. So more than likely we are going to fail at whatever it is you think we are trying to do that is probably way off base.

[Alph]

<Unintended post echo thing redacted.>

[Tinker]

So you think that it will be impossible to accomplish campaign finance reform huh?

[Alph]

Tinker,

I heard that speech from dozens of dot com guys during the whole of their bubble. "You don't understand, man. It's a new world. None of the old rules apply." I was doing heavy manufacturing at the time. Heavy engineering. Heavy computer usage. But it was their religion. Engineers, technicians, programmers, none of these were anything before the scrutinizing gaze of these visionaries if they disagreed with the dot com religion. Any question about practicalities, about natural human constraints, about the businesses cycle, about things that have been true since before the industrial revolution started and will be true long after it is forgotten, was met by derision. The business cycle was over, man, the new economy ran under different rules, and I was a fool for not giving them the five million that was all they needed to totally reform how everyone got pet food. Nowadays they're all out of businesses, taken out with the rest of the trash from the dot com bubble. And I'm still here, having spent the decades in durable goods and real estate, both massively profitable because of advances in computers, through machine automation or computerized chemical fabrication respectively.

Future and recent social media IPOs are dying on the vine in front of our eyes. Right now. Facebook, Zynga, Groupon. But your God brooks none before him. No fact will sway your mind from the 'new world' that's going to right all the wrongs that vex you, and that makes you matter.

I'm not your enemy, Tinker. And you know me better than your knee jerk reaction against me indicates. But no matter what I say to try to help you, you'll just see it as an attack. You'll do the cliquish, true believer, inside the bubble response of, 'You just don't understand, because you're not with the new hipness.' So let's agree to disagree, and leave it at just this: If your 'movement that's not a movement, protest that's not a protest, organization that's not an organization' remakes the world, count me a fool. But if it fails, and especially if it fails for the reasons that I have specified, remember that I was your friend all along.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Alph,

It would help to think this in different ethical systems even if it is a bit reductionist.

- The Farmer Ethical System

- the Hunter/Gather Ethical System

We have created these megapolises that are not cognizant of the old Farmer systems and have reverted (trying to revert?) to hunter/gather ethics that preceded the Agricultural Revolution.

I like to call the phenomenon the Urbanus movement.

Is it sustainable? No, not yet, 'cause we do still rely heavily on the farms, we are just not doing it ourselves anymore so it's a bit of a Morelock/Elohi syndrome

Is it idyllic? I don't think so but we are going to find out.

Hunter-Gathers are more egalitarian, less hierarchical, don't understand anything outside of utalitarianism/emotivist interactions, don't hold a personal 'I' nor a collective 'Us'. They are more "violent," physically and socially but more adaptable to changing situations and methods.

When your environs are completely interactive and an artifact of your mind, you are constantly changing yourself and the world on the hunt and gathering in this "In-Form-ation" age.

[Alph]

NapLajoieonSteroids,

That's a fair argument. But the technological move between increasing returns for centralization of power, culturally, religiously, and economically, and its decentralization, is the rise of the Roman Empire and the fall of the Western Roman Empire at the zenith of the power of the Eastern Roman Empire. It is the story of the dark ages, and the story of the rise of feudalism in Europe, and the story of the rise of colonial powers, of the British Raj, of the fragmentation of the colonial powers, and the rise of internationalism. It is a pendulum that has swung back and forth throughout human history, more so than just during the rise of irrigation and permanent farming.

We are in an age where decentralization of power is winning out, for sure. But that doesn't mean that things are changing in an ahistorical fashion, that the change is going to happen in human as opposed to institutional time scales, that it will not be reversed by unforeseen technological advances moving us in a different direction before then, or that OWS is going to succeed.

[Tinker]

When you say succeeed what exactly do you mean?

[lzzrdgrrl]

[Tinker]

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-lives ... kland#more

Demon, you really need to read this, read the whole thing.

[Tinker]

[lzzrdgrrl]

[Tinker]

[Demon of Undoing]

[Tinker]

[Mr. Perfect]

[Mr. Perfect]

[monster_gardener]

[lzzrdgrrl]

[Tinker]