Notes On A Revolution

Shoes to run on a bridge that will carry us. (Taken with instagram)

garychou:

Nobody Tells This to Beginners

Amen!

How is it that this exists in America and in Australia we’re letting the tobacco lobby be the ones with the loudest voice? (Taken with instagram)

2nd Avenue freeze out (Taken with instagram)

First Saturday wandering around New Amsterdam. Love the history in this place. (Taken with Instagram at Stuyvesant Square Park)

Image by eschipul via Flickr

Kevin Kelly gave a talk recently called “6 Words for the Modern Internet“. Isn’t it funny that we can already talk about what the “modern” Internet is? I wonder if TV felt the same way 15-20 years in. My gut says “…not really…”, but I don’t know. Do you?

It is mostly stuff you may have heard before, but his 5th word caught my eye:

5. Accessing
When everything is always there and always on, access to things becomes more important than owning them. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix all push people toward “just in time purchasing,” because you might as well wait until you’re ready to consume it.

“The burdens of ownership will be seen against the benefits of access,” Kelly said.

That last statement is key. Trouble is, I think consumers are already cottoning on to this. It’s the rights holders whose business models are built around ownership as opposed to access that have the most catching up to do.

Watch his talk here at Wired.com.

Gypsy & The Cat – Time To Wander #musicmaps (Taken with Instagram at Central Park – Bethesda Fountain)

Where does one fucking begin? We have now genetically engineered tomatoes to be less like tomatoes and thus somehow more convenient? Are you shitting me? And they have the audacity to talk about being grown”as nature intended”? (Taken with instagram)

From The West Wing:

Bartlet: Did you know that two thousand years ago a Roman citizen could walk across the face of the known world free of the fear of molestation? He could walk across the Earth unharmed, cloaked only in the protection of the words civis Romanus — I am a Roman citizen. So great was the retribution of Rome, universally certain, should any harm befall even one of its citizens. Where was Morris’s protection, or anybody else on that airplane? Where was the retribution for the families, and where is the warning to the rest of the world that Americans shall walk this Earth unharmed, lest the clenched fist of the most mighty military force in the history of mankind comes crashing down on your house?! In other words, Leo, what the hell are we doing here?!

Leo: We are behaving the way a superpower ought to behave.

Bartlet: Well our behavior has produced some crappy results, in fact I’m not a hundred per cent sure it hasn’t induced it.

Leo: What are you talking about?

Bartlet: I’m talking about two hundred and eighty-six American marines in Beirut, I’m talking about Somalia, I’m talking about Nairobi-

Leo: And you think ratcheting up the body count’s gonna act as a deterrent?

When I was in New York last September, I visited St. Paul’s Chapel which is across the road from Ground Zero. It is one of the oldest churches in the US, and, following the attacks on the World Trade Center, became a memorial to that day and the people that lost their lives.

I didn’t know how I would react, but I found myself sitting in the middle of the church sobbing. I’m not a big cryer, but it was hard not to be moved by it all.

Watching yesterday’s events unfold was a strange experience. I will never know what it was to be American, let alone in New York on September 11th, 2001. I can’t begin to imagine seeing that sort of thing unfold in my country. I do think it is better that the world does not have someone like him in it, but there is something vulgar about celebrating the killing of another, regardless of what has transpired.

I was thinking this as I read a piece from Good’s Cord Jefferson who titled it “When You “Piss on Osama’s Grave,” You Make America Unexceptional”. As I say above, I will never be capable of feeling what an American would have felt on that day, but I felt something very particular towards America as I watched the footage roll in on MSNBC. I’ll let Cord (an American) do the rest:

Where is the patriotism in finding joy from gory photos? Where is it in “partying” at Ground Zero or the University of Delaware? What’s particularly American about making out with your girlfriend at news of an assault that left dozens of people in a third-world country dead?

I’m happy that Osama Bin Laden is gone. He unabashedly dedicated himself to the wanton destruction of people around the world—remember that not just Americans are killed by terrorists—and the likelihood of him ever stopping that pursuit was nil. Still, in America, where we’re taught from a very young age to not kick your enemies when they’re down, all this chest-thumping in the wake of a man’s execution seems misplaced at best, especially among “progressives.”

American citizens often like to think of themselves as good Christians—decent, kind God-fearing people who defend what’s right even when that’s difficult, just as Jesus would have. Last night was an opportunity to live up to that ideal, to let the world know that we are powerful but we’re not drunk with power. Instead, we got wasted and said we wanted to rub our balls on Osama’s dead face, belying American exceptionalism by not acting exceptional, but entirely common.

I also went back to a piece I wrote almost three years ago as President Obama accepted the Democratic nomination. It seems naive now, but in America 2.0, what I talked about more than anything was the idea of America. The reality is, most of the time, far from where we wish it was, but I still long for the country America is capable of being.

As do, as far as I can see, a lot of Americans.

I’ve written a new piece for Uncluttered White Spaces, it’s called “The Curse of the Expert“. In it, I outline the challenges we face as we become increasingly better at something, how we can combat that slide into an increasingly myopic future, and why focusing on passions is the key to it all.

Focusing on being a great doctor could be any number of things, from having an encyclopedic knowledge of all drugs on the market to making sure your practice never gets sued. If your focus is on helping and healing people to the best of your abilities, you’re more likely to be aware of the opportunities to do that exist outside of the next prescription.

I hope you enjoy, I’m look forward to the discussion.

–

Image courtesy of Dunechaser, with thanks to compfight.