The Missing Folkways of Globalization

June 16, 2010 By

Between individual life scripts and civilization-scale Grand Narratives, there is an interesting unit of social analysis called the folkway. Historian David Hackett Fischer came up with the modern definition in 1989, in his classic, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:

…the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts…Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense — though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact — the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.

Ever since I first encountered Fischer’s ideas, I’ve wondered whether folkways might help us understand the  social landscape of globalization. As I started thinking the idea through, it struck me that the notion of the folkway actually does the opposite. It helps explain why a force as powerful as globalization hasn’t had the social impact you would expect. The phrase “global citizen” rings hollow in a way that even the officially defunct “Yugoslavian” does not. Globalization has created a good deal of  industrial and financial infrastructure, but no real “social landscape,” Friedman-flat or otherwise. Why? I think the answer is that we are missing some folkways. Why should you care? Let me explain. [Read more…]

Digital Security, the Red Queen, and Sexual Computing

June 9, 2010 By

There is a technology trend which even the determinedly non-technical should care about. The bad guys are winning. And even though I am only talking about the bad guys in computing — writers of viruses, malware and the like — they are actually the bad guys of all technology, since computing is now central to every aspect of technology. They might even be the bad guys of civilization in general, since computing-driven technology is central to our attacks on all sorts of other global problems ranging from global poverty to AIDS, cancer, renewable energy and Al Qaeda. So turning around and winning this war might even be the single most important challenge facing humanity today. Even that bastion of the liberal arts and humanities, The Atlantic Monthly, has taken note, with this excellent feature on how the best security researchers in the world are losing the battle against the Conficker worm. Simple-minded solutions, ranging from “everybody should get a Mac” to “just stick to Web-based apps and netbooks” to “practice better digital hygeine” are all temporary tactical defenses against an adversary that is gradually gaining the upper hand on many fronts. I have concluded that there is only one major good-guy weapon that has not yet been tried: sexual computing. And it hasn’t been tried because major conceptual advances in computer science are needed. I’ll explain what I mean by the term (it is a fairly obvious idea for those who know the background, so there may be more accepted existing terms for the vision), but I’ll need to lay some groundwork first.

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Three Off-Ribbonfarm Posts

June 3, 2010 By

You may have noticed that in the last few weeks, I haven’t exactly been posting spectacular original content on this blog. A vacation and the simultaneous bootstrapping of two new writing outlets (the Trailmeme blog and the Be Slightly Evil email list), are part of the reason. The other part of the reason is that all my current ribbonfarmesque ideas are currently in the form of several rather demanding drafts (reading Gibbon’s 6-volume “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” doesn’t exactly catalyze tweet-sized ideas). So rather than post hasty dreck, I figured I’d just point you to some of my posts on the Trailmeme blog that might interest you.

  • In Rent vs. Buy and Digital Lifestyle Design I looked at what’s happening to an age-old decision due to the impact of future-of-work forces
  • In The Marcus Aurelius School of Curation, I argue that information curation (an emerging new profession) is less like being a librarian, and more like being a stoic emperor. And yeah, this post is partly inspired by my current obsession with the history of Rome. Expect a lot of Rome references from me in upcoming writing. The fact that I was actually vacationing in Italy, and wandering around Pompeii, while reading the thing, probably helped burn the book into my head a lot more vividly.
  • In The Eight Belts of Information Ninja-Hood I have one of my usual overworked metaphors.

These are just a sampling. There’s more stuff there. Between me and a colleague, that blog sees about 4 new posts a week. Subscribe to that blog if this vein of writing interests you. The Be Slightly Evil email list is turning into an interesting project as well, and after 4 experimental mailings, I am finally beginning to get a sense of how and what to write there. All you sociopath wannabes — subscribe if you haven’t already.

And oh yeah, the book is coming along nicely. I had some writer’s block going for a while, but things are back on track.

Lots of balls to juggle, but I am making my writing processes more aerodynamic all along, so you should see things back to normal here in a week or two. I have a couple of really interesting (to me at least) posts shaping up.

In the Real World…

May 27, 2010 By

The phrase “In the real world…” comes up in many different contexts and conversations, and is deployed by all sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons. Over several years of watching and filing away instances, a script for a funny SNL style sketch, stringing together several of these conversations, occurred to me. Well, at least I think it is funny. I wanted to do it as a comic-strip, but never got around to it.

Here’s the script for the sketch. I call it The Circle of Life. Okay, my dialogue is not exactly Shakespeare quality, but bear with me here. Bad fiction in the service of a non-fiction point.

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Intellectual Gluttony

May 19, 2010 By

An Einstein quote that I disagree with is the following:

Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

It is the best known of various cautions against “intellectual greed.” I once interviewed at a university where there seemed to be a particularly strong fear of intellectual over-reach. Every faculty member I talked to had a word of caution about young researchers and “intellectual greed” — taking on too many, too big, or too wide-ranging a set of intellectual interests. If this is a sin — and it sort of sounds like one, which is why the biblical word “gluttony” seems more appropriate to me — I am certainly guilty. But if I am going to hell anyway, I might as well know why in a little more detail.

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A Bumper May Harvest of Good Reading

May 12, 2010 By

I am headed out on a trip after a hectic week, so I didn’t have time to pipeline a new post for the week. Fortunately for me, I’ve reaped a bumper harvest of unusually good reading on the Web in the last week, so I thought I’d share a selection. If you follow @ribbonfarm, you may have already seen these. I put the selections on a convenient trail if you want to jump right in, otherwise read on for my quick commentary. Warning: I read the kind of stuff I write, so all these are long-to-epic size reads.

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Two Interesting Gervais Principle Follow-Ups

May 6, 2010 By

I thought I’d share two recent ‘Gervais Principle’ related posts that crossed my radar. There have been quite a few blog reactions to the GP series over the last 6 months, but most don’t venture beyond an editorial comment or two. These two go further, in a couple of rather dangerous (and fun) directions.

First, a few weeks back, Pete Carapetyan emailed me about his post on dealing with passive aggressive. He doesn’t cite or relate the ideas to GP directly, but he tells me that the post is “inspired” by GP (dangerously ambiguous linkage term there).

Working with Passive Aggressives

Working with a PA is the most counter-intuitive thing you will ever do. That is their primary tactic, coming across exactly opposite from what is really going on, which also includes covering their tracks. Well honed PA skills never show on the radar, that is how the whole system works.

In a different vein, Jacob, writing in the extreme early retirement (nice name for a blog, that), has a post riffing on the idea that if you can’t join the sociopaths, perhaps you can beat them by owning them, by turning to capitalism? Jacob suggests that this requires giving up addictive consumerism.

A Cure to Careerism

Of course there is a third way, extreme early retirement, which sadly is considered too extreme by many. The reason is that it means giving up consumerism which to consumers is like giving up cigarettes for smokers. Not only are many people suffering from careerism, but they are also suffering from consumerism believing that it is impossible, at least for them, to live a satisfying life without shopping.

Note that this is a different exit strategy than the ‘exile/exodus’ strategy described in Managing Language (With Extreme Prejudice), on Tobias C. Van Veen’s Fugitive Philosophy blog, which I highlighted earlier.

I’ll withhold my own opinion for now, other than to note that I agree that the questions being raised are important, even if I don’t entirely agree with the answers. Click on, check out the articles, and comment. I’ll be following the discussion with interest of course.

The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel

May 4, 2010 By

It takes some guts to subtitle a business book “The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World.” Even for a genre whose grand overstatements are only rivaled by the diet-books aisle, that is an ambitious tagline. The Lords of Strategy lives up to that subtitle and then some.  It is a grand, sweeping saga that tells the story of how the ill-defined function known as “corporate strategy” emerged in the 60s, systematically took over  boardrooms and MBA classrooms, and altered the business landscape forever. Even though we are only 4 months into 2010, it is pretty likely this is going to be the best business book of the year for me. If you are considering, currently in, or recently graduated from, an MBA program, you really must read this book. If this book had been written 10 years ago, it would have saved me a good deal of trouble making my own career decisions.

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Be Slightly Evil

April 28, 2010 By

It’s time for yet another Ribbonfarm update. The big news, since the last update, is that I’ve incorporated Ribbonfarm as a small, slightly evil corporation, and started figuring out how exactly to take you guys for everything you’ve got.  Anyway, here goes. Lots of items to cover:

  1. The “Be Slightly Evil” Email List and Corporate Value
  2. Ribbonfarm Inc., Q1 report, including spin-offs, layoffs and the like
  3. Status of the Tempo book project
  4. Roundup of Articles

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The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development

April 14, 2010 By

In the first two parts of this series, we talked about the archetypes that inhabit organizations (Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless), what they do (the Gervais Principle) and how (the four languages). In this part, we’ll use a somewhat unorthodox take on the idea of arrested development to explain why the three groups behave as they do, and use that to predict the outcomes of individual interpersonal interactions.

Series Home | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | ebook

 

For those who came in late: read Part I and Part II first, to avoid serious misunderstandings.

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