Tor Nørretranders has written an excellent book about generosity. It has gotten a decent amount of media exposure since it came out, mostly due to some (literally) sexy catchphrases.
But the book has merit far beyond easy catchphrases. Humans are generous, artistic, flamboyant, playful individualists. And what’s more, we’re the happiest when we can be all of that. Why?
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I used to love playing the Infocom adventure games on my Commodore 64. Yes, they had no graphics and no sound. But they did have excellent text and the cleverest, most infuriating puzzles. Also the games had an excellent parser, that could even understand input like “Put the x in the y using z” (hot stuff back then, when many adventure games only accepted input formatted like “verb noun”).
There’s also a lot of humour in there. One of the games had you running around a maze of walls (actually many of them did). In this case if you got desperate enough to try “listen to the wall” the game came back with “Ah, a Pink Floyd Fan.”
My absolute favourite is Planetfall where you’re a lonely ensign third class from the Stellar Patrol Ship Feinstein, stranded on a deserted planet. You need to find a way home, before you run out of food and water. Click more to see an example of the kind of things I relly liked about the Infocom games.
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I just stumbled on an article describing Appreciative Inquiry. It’s an excellent intro from the author of “The thin book of appreciative inquiry”.
There isn’t much information on how to get started using AI, but the governing principles and values of AI are described. And most importantly, there’s an actual case story on how AI was used in a community project in the South Bronx.
This is one of Dee Hock’s favourite tricks to play on an audience. “How many of you recognize this?” he asks, holding out his own Visa card. Every hand in the room goes up. “Now,” Hock says, “how many of you can tell me who owns it, where it’s headquartered, how it’s governed, or where to buy shares?” Confused silence. No one has the slightest idea, because no one has ever thought about it.
Dee Hock is the mastermind behind Visa and this book is part autobiography, part introduction to Dee’s thoughts on complexity theory and part social manifesto.
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Appreciative Inquiry is an extremely effective and fun method for introducing positive change. It bases itself on the assumption that improvement can be achieved by focusing on the positive and doing more of that. Normally when we try to improve something, we do the opposite. We focus on what doesn’t work, and try do less of that. AI (as it’s known) is just as effective – and a lot more fun.
This book is a (as the name suggests) a concise how-to guide to AI.
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There’s a new, seriously cool feature currently being tested on Google, called Google sets. You name a couple of items and Google will attempt to expand that and find more items matching your examples.
Starting with “Bill Clinton” and “George Bush” might give you a set of american presidents while “apples”, “pears” and “bananas” gives you a list of fruits.
Let’s say you’re a fan of Open Space Technology and Appreciative Inquiry and you want to find more tools like them – well here’s a possible answer. Google rules!
I’m currently reading Tor N?rretranders’ latest book “det gener?se menneske” (The generous human). It’s all about how generosity and altruism can exist, in a cruel, Darwinistic, dog-eat-dog world. The answer seems to be that the the two basic mechanisms of Darwinism, natural selection and sexual selection, actually favour generous individuals.
This reminded me of an excellent article in Fast Company about sharing your business resources and network. In other words, expressing generosity and, yes, love through business.
And while researching the subject (actually while checking the spelling of generosity), I stumbled on generosity.org where you can find a fun way to practice generosity in daily life.
Ken MacLeod is the greatest living Trotskyist libertarian cyberpunk science-fiction humorist, and there’s a great interview with him here.
I’ve read most of his books, and they’re excellent. My favourite detail is a company that’s bought the ex-soviet nuclear arsenal, and use it to rent protection to countries that don’t have nuclear weapons – “You bomb our clients, and we will bomb you”.
The makers of this brilliant documentary got permission to follow the rise and decline of internet startup govworks.com VERY closely. We’re there as the idea slowly takes form. As the first rounds of financing are secured. We cheer as the company grows, and the future looks rosy. And we’re very much there as the whole thing goes wrong, and ends up costing the founders their friendship.
This is my favourite epitaph of the dotcom years. See it!
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