Surviving the Culture Wars

So, this is my first real post. Consider everything before this point a warm-up, getting past that "awkward" blogger phase where the new blogger isn't very sure of themself or their ideas. After this last week, I am sure.

First, about me. I currently work full-time as a volunteer for an AmeriCorps program called City Year. City Year's tagline is "give a year, change the world." I used to think this slogan was terribly hokey and far too rose-colored. (And that's saying a lot--I'm an idealist to begin with.) However, over the last nine months of my service, I have become a believer. As a result, I will blog (and tweet) more about my experience as a corps member in the future.

Now, about my goals and beliefs. Just like a right to water, I believe everyone on earth has a right to knowledge. That pretty much sums it up. Knowledge is power, it's the foundation of a democracy, and everyone has a right to it--everyone. My goal is liberating that knowledge and making it accessible and open to all who desire it. I see a number of barriers to this goal: legal, technological, and linguistic. Right now I evangelize Creative Commons to attempt to overcome the legal barrier. Next, I intend to help create more free and open source software to help overcome the technological barrier, alongside projects like One Laptop Per Child. Finally, my dream is to someday create fantastic free and open source language learning software (think Rosetta Stone) or even machine translation tools to overcome the linguistic barrier.

So this week has been huge for me. A massive step forward for education and the world, California announced an initiative for Open Educational Resources. Personally though, I was able to participate in an amazing conference in which I met many awesome people. In addition, I met one very special person through my work at City Year.

Over the weekend I gave two talks at a conference called BarCamp. The first was more of a group discussion in a Socratic seminar style format, and one person told me that it was the best talk he's ever heard. The second was my first serious presentation of my ideas (one in particular) to an audience. To those of you who gave it, thank you for your positive, constructive, and invaluable feedback. I will use it as I continue to give talks in the future, ideally with my next at MindShare. The video of my second talk is below.


I made a lot of amazing new friends at BarCamp, like some people who have developed a technology that actually makes the Internet faster. One very noteworthy and related to this post is Alex Peake, who runs empowerthyself.com, which uses the absolutely amazing tagline "Apathy is obsolete." I'll let you check out his site for yourself.

However, just this morning, here at City Year Los Angeles, I had the privilege of hearing Ben Sherwood talk about his life and his goals. To be blunt, I'm freaking out. We share so much vision and belief that it's ridiculous. I sincerely hope that he watches the video of my talk and that we continue to have a dialogue about survival, the media revolution, and the education of mankind.

My most memorable quotes from Ben are "everyone is surviving something," and "live life out of balance," while believing in your own efficacy. He has inspired me to completely defeat the determinism that I feel plagues so many in this world. We tend to believe that the world is too big, and that we can't make a difference. News flash: the world is getting smaller, and our power to change it is proportionately getting larger.

I was so impassioned by my interaction with Ben that I ran off to one of the computers at the office to write this post immediately. In fact, I'm already late for an opportunity to be at a gang prevention workshop in Watts. I have to go. Please check back as I continue to update an revise this post.

P.S. Ben, if you're reading this, please read the following article. I believe it will apply to your and your wife's work, as well as the future of media and the Internet:
iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England

Last week my friend Christopher randomly asked me to be part of his YouTube project, WEECY TV. I had an amazing conversation with two neighbors who I had never met, and Christopher did a great job editing it down to a few minutes. I could write about my current work, or the rest of that long, powerful conversation, but I'd rather let the video speak for itself:

My friend Steve commented on Facebook:

Hey Thom, the whole video was pretty cool. We had an Italian economist from the University of Rome come speak last night on the Italian and European economy, but he brought up the same line: there was a brilliant English economist (from the 19th century, the man's name escapes me, the article is titled something along the lines of: "A forecast for our Grandchildren") who wrote that come year 2030 (or so) the world will be at a point where greed will no longer exist because of the wealth will have increased 8-fold for the entire populous, and everybody (entrepreneurs specifically) will have satisfaction with their level of wealth.

Wealth in Europe has risen to that level, statistically it is 8-fold what it was then. But the world hasn't changed, and the Economist predicted the state of man a hundred years later incorrectly. This is because the driving factor of growth (entrepreneurs) was not the acquiring of wealth but rather success, that success is the basic human need which drove entrepreneurship and economics in general.

Thank you, Steve.

From elearnspace:

Adhering to the motto “a provocative title will surely increase readership”, Atlantic has an interesting article on How the Crash Will Reshape America:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

With that in mind, watch the following video:
Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism


I have a postulate for a module to add to the model that Umair Haque presents:
I postulate that in contrast to the traditional economic definition, goods and services are, in fact, the same thing.
I think that over the last few decades as our economy has shifted from goods-based to service-based, we are debunking a powerful myth.

Goods are services.

Now, before you object, consider this: Let's say I'm a car manufacturer, making Hummers. Now the 20th century capitalism says that a car is a product. I say, the production of that car is a service. A service with environmental impacts that are overlooked if the car is treated as a product. If the car is a product, then the manufacturer forgoes all responsibility the moment that car is purchased. From that point, it's the consumer's choice how to use the vehicle, and the manufacturer cannot be held accountable for the environmental consequences.

In today's economy, car sales have fallen off a cliff, while repair shops are overflowing with work. The car isn't a good, and the maintenance of the car is a sustainable service-based business model. In the following video, Shai Agassi makes the same point about paying for services and not for products-- like with cell phones.


I think this makes a lot of sense for open content, too-- like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is in the upper right quadrant of one of Umair Haque's graphs, as simultaneously disintegrating both property rights and governance. This is the real emergence of collective intelligence, and we are indeed on the cusp of a revolution. The social media revolution and the capitalistic depression are catalyzing this social capital revolution.

Those that thrive in the hybrid economy recognize that services outweigh goods. Google provides a search service. Companies that profit from the Internet are its service providers. Most web servers run Linux. Let this be the first lesson then:

Pay for services, not for software.

This is the unofficial motto of companies like Red Hat, as described in "The Commons: Celebrating Accomplishments, Discerning Futures" (about 36 minutes in.) What servers do Google, YouTube, Facebook, and every other successful web company run on? You guessed it, Linux.