O Seasteaders!

The tetrahedral floating city of Triton, designed by Buckminster Fuller for Tokyo BayAdmittedly, I subscribe to the Seasteading Institute newsletter. Patri Friedman is an interesting dude, to say the least, and I am a futurist. The Seasteading Institute has some of the brightest minds in the world behind its cause. Today's newsletter read thusly: 

Greetings Friends of The Seasteading Institute,

As protests spread across the USA, Congress approval ratings hit all-time lows, and the European Union contemplates dissolution, interest in seasteading is higher than ever. There's never been a greater need for an alternative to today's inadequate governments.

It's unfortunate that such gloomy news fuels our project, but the future is bright. The whole world will benefit when seasteading societies pioneer new forms of government, new policies, and new institutions. It is finally time for humanity to discover what government always should have been - innovative, effective, responsive, diverse, and benevolent.

With your support, The Seasteading Institute is enabling the next generation of government technology. We thank you, and thank the entrepreneurs, investors, volunteers and others who work on this cause all over the world.

Sincerely,

Michael Keenan

President of The Seasteading Institute

They've kind of got a point, don't they? Has government ever been less effective? And less reviled? And has an effective alternative ever been less quioxotic than it is now, in the age of information technologies and mass cooperation?

Rhetoric Revolutionized: How Twitter, Facebook, and Text Messaging Can Save Argument

<This guest post is contributed by Leslie Johnson, who writes about health, green living, and parenting at masters in health administration.>

   

the structural transformation of the public phereIt has been said time and time again: the internet has revolutionized the world in many ways.  The World Wide Web has unquestionably changed the way we live our lives, providing a means for instant information, endless conversation, and worthless entertainment.  While several aspects of our world have been altered by the internet, the way in which we communicate with one another is perhaps what has been the most altered.  With the advent of text messaging, Facebook, and Twitter comes a new discourse environment and a new rhetoric.  While critics endlessly condemn social media as a destructor of verbal language, when used to its fullest capacity social media has the potential to promote public discourse and constructive argument.

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The Disconnect of Staying Connected

<This guest post is contributed by Mariana Ashley who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana dot ashley031 at gmail dot com.>

Eyes down and only half-listening to what was supposed to be a two-sided conversation, my roommate's fingers clacked away on her Blackberry as she responded to e-mails, sent in a fresh tweet, and blasted her boyfriend with the fifth "I love you more!" text since we sat down. I pondered why I even bothered to go out for coffee with a person who seemed less interested in interacting with someone who was actually there and more interested in interacting with those who weren't.

Chances are I am not the first to marvel at this wonder - how it seems the more that people are connected by technology, the less they are connected to actual people. A friend once told me a story about a group of customers in her restaurant who spent their entire meal talking to one another through their Nintendo DS devices. None of them uttered an actual word to one another, aside from the occasional yelp of victory or distress from whatever game they were playing. How is it that we can be more social than ever through social media and still be completely shut out from human interaction?

The allure of connectedness through technology is obvious. With a click of a button, you can send out a missive to everyone in your phone book. You can have lengthy or short discussions with someone without having to suffer through the awkward pauses that tend to fill the holes of face-to-face conversations. You don't even have to comb your hair or put on make-up or change out of your sweaty gym clothes to talk to someone through texting, Facebook, or e-mail. All in all, technology makes it easier than ever to communicate, which may be the most dangerously seductive aspect of it.

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Read It or Leave It

Do you want a roundhouse kick to the face from a guy wearing these bad boys? I didn't think so.There is an unjustified consensus among expats that living in East Asia ruins your English ability.  It's true I find myself forgetting how to spell simple words and making high school mistakes when it comes to word choice or style, but in general my English has improved since I came here. 

To follow up on my last post, this is because English teachers have to think about literally every word that comes out of our mouths; we gradually habituate to using terminology and grammar that our students can understand. 

When I came upon the works of Kay Hetherly a few weeks ago, it became clear to me that not only could expats write well, but that they could write well because they were expats.  Hetherly's Hemmingway-like paucity of words and exactness is something to which I aspire. 

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Why Should I Have to Defend Libertarianism?

This symbol of libertarianism represents an entirely consequentialist morality.Blogging is the rock 'n' roll of the information generation, and Ezra Klein is its Bob Dylan.  In a May 21st post, Three types of arguments over policy, Klein soberly reins in and classifies the noise of a drunken and whirling Washington:

Washington is home to two -- actually, three -- different types of policy debates. The first one, the one that we're used to, asks whether a policy will work. That's the one where I say health-care reform is likely to achieve its goals and cut costs and David Brooks says it won't do either thing and we both try to marshal empirical evidence in service of our points. In theory, whoever's evidence is stronger wins.

Then there's the second one, which is the one that (Rand) Paul is giving voice to, which asks whether a policy is philosophically acceptable. Paul isn't arguing that the Civil Rights Act was ineffective at desegregating Woolworth lunch counters. He's arguing that government shouldn't tell private businesses what to do, and when they do, that's not legitimate even if it achieves its stated policy goals. Or, more prosaically, a Republican argues that we shouldn't have more government involvement in health care because government involvement is bad, and that's true whether or not it's proved efficient in other countries. In theory, whoever's philosophy is more appealing wins.

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Why Youth Leads the Recovery

source: Justice DepartmentThis week's Featured Find, an excellent Atlantic article by Dan Peck examining the long-run social costs of persistent unemployment, contains an embedded series of glourified vlogs blasting the youth of the nation for being "Followers, Not Leaders" and entitled basterds.  Au contraire, stuffy old people, WE, the youth, will lead the economic recovery, for several reasons:

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Top Ten Moments of the Decade

This is a graphical representation of the internet. See if you can find the Inductive.Believe it or not, the decade is almost over.  It seems like only yesterday we were complaining about Jar Jar Binks and stockpiling canned goods and guns in preparation for Y2K, but today is November 23rd, 2009; there are only 38 days left in the decade that we still can't agree on a name for, much less an image.  Going back in time, we have clear images from the 1920s (flappers, gangsters, and jazz) to the 1990s (pastels, CDs, and hip hop), but this current decade is different, maybe because most of us haven't left our rooms, or maybe just because we haven't distanced ourselves in time enough to construct false, catalogued memories. 

A friend and I were discussing the idea of decades last week.  We agreed that the concept was an absurd attempt at stereotype, like the "Dark Ages", which were largely the creation of anti-Catholic 17th-century historians.  But there is something to historicity, whether that something is nostalgia or embarrassment.  Indeed, many of our images of particular decades are just plain mistaken.  For example, the hippie culture, so quintessentially 60s, actually peaked in the 1970s.  The political correctness zeitgeist grew to prominence in 1980s - not the 90s.  The Japanese stock market, harbinger of the 1980s, hit its peak on December 29th, 1989, and Japan was still the most expensive country in the world in 1995.  The 50s rock and roll songs "Louie Louie", "Surf City", and "Walk Like a Man" were released in 1963, just two years before "Satisfaction", "Like a Rolling Stone", and "My Generation".  The Beegee's "Jive Talkin'" and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" competed in the same billboard chart in 1975.

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