Web 2.0

There’s has been a lot of chatter on the internets about Web 2.0, specifically as a result of the Web 2.0 conference which concludes today in San Francisco. I've been picking up threads about it from the sources I tap into, like Dave Winer and his extended network. And I confess that the profusion of new, or more accurately, repackaged ideas are things I've thought about, too, for over the past 15 years.
I think that what's missing -- as has always been missing -- is an appreciation for the nature of work and play, and the intellectual/cross-connect between these two issues. Everything seems to funnel into process and product and markets without first funneling into a consideration of what people put their hands on things to either absorb or create digital artifacts of their thought processes and their conversations. Maybe at a deep, academic level some people deal in ontologies and epistemologies, but once it reaches the level of public discussion level, the dots aren't connected. And that's what this praxis is about.

Writing is a struggle against silence

It seems like I have been struggling. I can't say that it's against silence, per se, but it may be with the persistence of silence. It's persistence in the face of all my cognitive efforts to life myself out of it.
I have been stunned relatively silent by the Hurricane and the government's reaction to it. Sure there's been a few posted comments on a blogs, but no coherent thinking through if the issue. And that's probably because there is no rational, coherent thinking through that can be done. At least from my perspective. This event draws together so many things -- the persistence of poverty (in fact its growth) in "the richest country in the world". The impact of environmental degradation. The growing grim of corporatists, crony capitalism on the government and its seeming intractability. Likewise there's the intractability of many of our societal assumptions -- the frames or meta-assumptions about "what happened" and "what there is to do". Like declaring a "war on weather" -- a city drowns and they put generals and admirals in charge. Now as a practical matter, that's probably the best thing. The military "get it done" ethos seems to be the best match for the challenge at hand.
From an "anticipatory design science" perspective, there's a huge opportunity here. Of course that's a pretty universal statement. I'm just finishing Bucky's meister-werke "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth". It reiterated (pre-iterates?) a lot of what I'm already familiar with, but the presentation is so dense and so cogent. And I wonder why, after 35 years, more of this thinking isn't more in the mainstream. Why doesn't there seem to be a widespread inquiry into value that would unleash people into being design scientists -- the recognition of value as being maximized when effort is expended in the service of the common good. I suppose there are economic formalisms that relate comparable notions, but they're like so buried in jargon that they don't do much good. Of course Bucky's multi-hyphenated neologisms and stream of conscious free-association -- weaving together these grand notion in 75-word sentence/paragraphs -- has its own challenges in terms of accessibility.

42 versus 13

I read yesterday that 42 percent of the US population believes in Biblical creation. 42 percent -- that's a pretty stunning number to me. And maybe it should be stunning that I'm the one who's stunned. I guess if I polled my immediate circle of acquaintances, it would be very small. Maybe 1 or 2 percent, if I really pushed. And I think I know a fair number of people. This points to the fact that there are vast swaths of this country that are mostly fundamentalist. It's hard to get my mind around it.
Growing up Catholic, in a Parochial education system, from the very start it was clear that even then, from the Catholic liturgical perspective, that Genesis was an allegory. I seem sto remember the nuns and priests responding to questions about the old testament with a kind of wink-and-nudge that God is the source of all this, but the discoveries that scientists have made more or less flesh out the specifics. It was a sensible response, and I don't think that even to a child, it undermines God's authority. And I suppose that if I was educated that way, I pretty much assumed everyone had comparable views.
I think I first encountered the notion of creationism in the 70s. Even then, it just seemed silly and easily written off. Again, I didn't know anybody who shared those beliefs. I didn't know any Biblical literalists. It took me until my 20s when I first encountered somebody who was a Born-again fundamentalist with those kinds of beliefs. On this encounter, I was struck in disbelief; how could an adult function in the modern world with such beliefs? I'll admit to being as ignorant and closed-minded as I might accuse someone of that stripe -- I just couldn't entertain the thought, it was that foreign.
Today, though, the implications of this 42 percent figure are more dire. I always assumed that there was about 13 percent of the population who held genuine fundamentalists beliefs. I probably read that somewhere, I can't point to a source at the moment. But it fit -- I could see a population that is less than 15 percent fundamentalists; modern society could support that. But this 42 percent number -- I'm viscerally shocked by this. I become frightened at the implications of this. Because this is a motivated 42 percent, if this number is correct. From my perspective, the future prospects for a county with a belief system such as this is doomed to a new kind of fascistic dark ages. And that seems to be exactly what those who lead these people are intending.

Floating a Platform

September. Time to get serious.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe in the Southern US, I’m deeply concerned, as I am sure are all thinking people. Mostly I am quite discouraged that the current political power structure is structurally incapable of dealing with this crisis. Indeed, in alignment with its “starve the beast” mentality, it will do everything in its power to undermine the role of government in the recovery.

I read a post on Eschaton today that advocated rebuilding New Orleans as a true 21^st Century city. A Sun city. A green city. A designed city. Of course I gravitate to that idea. Nut is there any serious politician who would stand up and promote such as visionary notion? I think not. Moreover, there’s more than a hint of elitism in that notion as well – as if we on the sidelines, generally people not in that area or environment – start dictating what to do to the people who know and understand the region. I’m not for a moment going to pretend that I know or understand all the issues evolved in the Southern Gulf ecosystems, although I have learned a great deal about it in the past week.

So what is the “anticipatory design science” response to the Hurricane and its aftermath? Certainly it’s hard to say specifically, as the full impact is sorting itself out. Are there opportunities here to start to crack through the entrenched infrastructure, and to start bringing a designed, nuanced, for-all response? Certainly so, but I’m not optimistic. I’m looking at my own platform. Am I ready to stand up and grab some rein of power, wherever it might be? Not now, not really. I look at the state of the political game, and it seems such a no-win situation. Those who have power and who know how to get it, they’re the eternally aggressive, eternally paranoid and opportunistic types for whom new ideas are anathema, except for when it come to new ideas about how to exploit. That’s a tough nut to crack.

At the same time, many people, in small ways and large, are becoming capable of piecing together solutions that could address the multi-dimensional crises we face. Hopefully the internet-mediated response to this tragedy will provide a seed crystal to bring us a platform for smarter approaches.

Reboot

I took August off for vacation.
Well that's not really true. But it's been a strange month. I think I nailed a new job on the 1st, but STILL haven't heard anything, and I'm getting a little concerned. I resurrected an old project and it may move forward, which is exciting. And the polyopticon project proceeds astride (whatever that means.)
I did have a very fertile period mid-month, reconnect with some other old ideas, and that experience made it clear that sooner or later, I need to build my own idea foundry. There is no scarcity of ideas and concepts to be pursued, certainly none on the micro-level. Nor, indeed, any on the macro-level -- the sheer scope of where progressive thinking and LEADERSHIP is needed and wanted can seem pretty overwhelming.
I'm reading Bucky's best-known book, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth". I think I've been exposed to a lot of this thinking through exposure to later works. But this is written pretty simply, and I intend to share it with my son.
I also completed a novel this summer -- "The Kite Runner" is quite popular, and it's a good story. Recommended. I also completed Eli Goldratt's 'The Goal". I was struck by the degree to which I intuited a lot of the TOC stuff he talks about, particularly about theory. Finally, I finished Professor Zuboff's "The Support Economy". That's an architecture for a whole new economic and p
I have fallen in love with my new dSLR camera -- a Canon Rebel XT 350. It's hard to take a bad picture with this thing, and by using Picasa, even the bad ones can be redeemed.
Still not much progress on the Personal Workstation project.

Entropy

I've been thinking a lot recently about entropy. I've been thinking that's a bad thing, certainly not a pleasant topic of you think about it's implications. But if you are thinking about it, it's possible to think that "thinking about entropy" might be an antidote against it. Or certainly an inoculation – I think Bucky Fuller called that Syntropy.
Interesting that I should be looking for an "antidote" to entropy -- something to counter it. I suppose Jeremy Rifkin left me with "What to do about entropy" a long time ago. Likewise, Wild Bill Brooks, who inscribed my High School yearbook with Gibbs’s free energy equation G^o = H^o - TS^o
I always liked that and never really knew why. It took quite a while to come to understand the attraction, and I may only now be in a position to really come to understand the significance.
My head has been in pure science and technology speculation the past month or two. Nothing too productive has come from it, but it's good to keep thinking in that direction. My intuitive sense is that we, as a species, need to do a lot more thinking about the importance of science, and quickly, or we’re going to be in big trouble.

Writing a book

One of the reasons I started this blog is simply to get back into the practice of writing again. It's been fitful, I'll admit. I'm distracted by the immediate need to "get a job" -- that's definitely the proper thing for me to occupy my attention right now. And yet this time away from a full-time position should be an opportunity to rejuvenate the practice of putting words on page (well at least putting pixels on screen).

The logic of writing a book is simple - it seems to be the entree into doing the kind of consulting and teaching that I'd like to do. The concept is to slice off a big topic, do some research, and throw my whole kitchen sink of distinctions at the topic. It introduces the new notions, searches for applicability, brings in experts (hopefully) and establishes credibility. When people say" "What have you done?", you can pull it out and say "I wrote this book." It's an advantage.

So what am I going to write about? It's really my thesis: The Design Service Society. After reading Dan Pink's book, I realized that the time in right to bring forward a thesis I've been formulating for 12 years. And now, having completed Professor Zuboff's book, it's even clearer that the timing is right. It’s very exciting.

Your Own Personal Workstation

I have been grappling with the issue of designing fitting, comfortable, and effective personal information ecology since...forever. Certainly since the late 1980s. I have been through all the PIMs, the outliners, the groupware -- REXX-driven TSRs, OCR-driven text input with ZyIndexing, and the like. More recently I've been dealing with all the web-driven tools -- the blogs and Wiki and so forth; SharePoint and LAMP and so on. It's all been...vaguely dissatisfying. Why?
On one hand I am being harsh, and that harshness points at something that's missing. At the same time, I should be thrilled with what I have -- I do have a personal workstation. By using Google Desktop search, all the text, e-mail -- everything on my system is accessible. Through a "broadband" cable modem connection, I can link to practically any information source on a global basis, and have the server end generally be the constrained resource. But at the same time, as I think about what it would take to craft a more amenable access to point into a person information ecology, I encounter the modern malaise -- too many choices and not enough guidance.
Let's get consultative about this: First and foremost, what is the desired end-state? At the end of the day, what's the desire outcome -- what do you (I) want to have in hand? The first thought that occurs is that I want to be fed. And interesting analogy, and one that has certainly has been dwelled on and dealt with, certainly with the emergence of RSS. But as sophisticated and the web can be spun to feed things to me, and even with he possibility of applying collaborative filtering to my meta-feed stream, it's still a situation where I need to proactively interact with the random and variable information universe out there in a and associative-bordering-on-random fashion. I need to find, then bring back into my environment , some item of interest. Now that item of interest may provoke connection to others, but there is still a linearity; it isn't really "as we may think" because, I think, there is a lot more to how we think, and how we construct connection, than what can be modeled in a 2-d system.

I want a system that keeps all my concerns in a whole and complete fashion. This involves the element of design; I will always been upgrading, tweaking, recontextualizing, and reconnectiong all the various elements on a constant basis, but I want to, at the end of the day, feel confident that all my bases are covered. I don't see any way to get that now. In my mind I can invent some of the necessary, evolutionary pieces -- I think. But it’s hard. The design language isn't quite there. Right now, I feel constrained by the 2-dimensionality of current approaches. That's why I'm working on a 3-d approach that's built on the backbone of existing technologies, but which guides and evolves the user experience toward the world as it is evolving, rather than stuck in the 2-d world as it has been for the past 60 years

Actually I think I will work up a requirements document for the personal information ecology. This is progress.

The power of Us

Last Week's Business Week featured a cover article about the new economic order emerging from the power of widespread collaboration and consumer empowerment. We have indeed arrived at Alvin' Toffler's "prosumer" -- the lines between production and consumption have totally blurred.
I finished reading Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind". Finished it more-or-less in one sitting. Well written, and Pink did an admirable job of personalizing the processes he suggests as ways to achieve left/right brain integration. His core tenet -- that the emerging creative society (what I'd call the Design Service Society" in oriented much more around "right brain" traits and activities. It's an interesting thesis, and he runs with it. The book is worth it if only for the Portfolio sections which are full of references. The website contains updated references and info.
What I'm seeing is the emergence into reality of the concepts I thought and wrote about in the first third of the 90's. It's all developing the way I foresaw it. While it's easy to say that a lot of people foresaw the emergence of a collaborative prosumer paradigm, fewer saw the importance of design (Don Norman, Steve Jobs). And their focus on design is a second-order effect -- it was more a capitalization on the value of design, not recognition of the shift toward a societal restructuring around servicing design. Target has nailed it in terms of the impact on the Zeitgeist, although I don't see too many people (beside Pink who does so somewhat more obliquely, as his focus is on the personal ecology of design, and not the societal impact)

The Design Service Economy (redux)

Reading this article in MyDD brought to mind an old notion that I’ve had that needs updating. I look back to some of the decade-old material I wrote for the Encapsulations newsletter, and realize that a lot of what we talked about then has come to pass in terms of build-out of infrastructure (large-scale adoption of computers, wide availability of relatively broadband service), the polity has not shifted into a mode that allows people to operate as agents in a design service economy – an economy based around taking advantage of the American capacity to generate nuance – new interpretation, new meanings, and then to generate the appropriate, just-in-time-delivered artifacts that pertain to perceived needs. The political powers-that-be are completely committed to a nation of weave slave-dom. They are dependent on the stream of payroll taxes paid by wage earners. But what if large swathes of the people operating in the economy suddenly constituted themselves as free agents? Imagine people constituting themselves as businesses, plugging their efforts into a matrix of income earning activities? What if the people really did own the means of production – that it was what’s between their ears, and that capacity to think is transformed into value by virtue of the capacity of the network?

The counter-argument to this runs to the common question “In an unlimited world, who kills the pig?”; that is to say, who does the grubby, non-intellectual, non-connected work in the society? My answer is: we all do. As I look into the future, there’s not doubt that the factory farming food production system put in place in this country will come increasingly untenable, given how dependent it is on petroleum. Others cover this better than I, but in a design service economy, people’s lives and livelihoods will be more varied, and there will need to be time to tend to food production and gathering at a local level, in a much more diversified and integrated way. (This topic calls for infinitely more research and development – the key points being that much of what is considered as work that people don’t want to do, when sufficiently demassified, becomes the work of the community. Again, much more needs to be worked out about this.

But imagine a world in which all people see themselves as full-enabled participants in the networked economy – free agents who recognize that their capacity to create some new, unique perception will give them the capacity to realize value as a result of their efforts. Each person contributing, each person connected.

I think the Democrat party needs to evolve toward a leadership model where the President is a super systems integrator. Somebody with the vision to address the needs of an emerging society where each person is not seen as a taxpayer, bound to the state by their payroll dedication, but as true free agents operating in new and novel ways to maximize the freedom value they experience personally which is, by definition, maximized by access to contributing to the whole of society. What is the necessary platform for integrating people in this way?

I can certainly say that very little of what exists as a platform is oriented toward this happening. The first impediment – seemingly intractable – is the very dependency of the US government on wage taxes. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the government and its various abetting agents and agencies have conformed the structure of the society to force people into relationships where the government automatically captures a substantial portion of the individual’s income. This system is patently inefficient; on the other side of the dependency is the political aristocracy that funnels these revenues into directions that it sees fit. This implies a large-scale disconnection between labor and its value. (Yes I’m self-conscious about using Marxist language, but the analytical integrity holds.) In a scenario where people are no longer locked into the wage tax model, and are free to constitute themselves as independent enterprisers, the addict’s supply is suddenly wrenched away. In this model, individuals collect all their income first, make decisions about its distribution, make investments in their own productive capacity, and then pay the government its due. In this case, people get to maximize their overall productive capacity of their network by investment in personal, family, and community resources. By so doing, they raise the overall income base. And, they demand an infrastructure that allows the nation to solidify and extend its competitive advantage in productive work. Further, in conjunction with the demassification of many of society’s “chore tasks”, each person will participate in a constant variety of productive efforts, which will add to their capacity to create nuance through the sheer multiplication of experiences.

What I present here is my own formulation of ideas that have been expounded on across the spectrum of thinkers and pundits. What’s been missing, as far as I’ve been able to discern, is a political tongue facile enough with these concepts to speak to people – to address the concerns that they actually do face, even if they have not overtly spoken about them. This is about real leadership for the future – and building a platform that brings cohesion to it all. Does it attack some of the most reliable Democratic allies – specifically unions? Well it would seem to, on the face of it. But the specific policy directions that building out such as vision implies actually present an opportunity for unions to achieve some of their long-sought-after agenda: universal health care access, educational equality, and the capacity to coordinate people’s lifelong expansion as productive agents.

The Design Service Economy is already here. Where people can plug into it and exchange their efforts by generating nuance, they are profiting. The political and economic infrastructure to support it are not yet in place, and there is little sign that anyone in a position of power has any more than a fleeting recognition of the fact that it is the prevailing model for competitive advantage in this country. The important recognition is that we need to enable all 295,000,000 people in this country to participate in it, and we need to do it quickly. Recognition is the first step.

Real Musical Diversity?

I attended two concerst over the weekend. On Friday I saw Aimee Mann at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. Last night I saw Dick Dale, King of Surf Guitar, at the North Star, in Philadlephia. Enjoyed both shows immensely. Indeed theses two artists reflect a certain diversity of tatste, but the diversity I've been pondering is the total racial segregation I observed at these two shows. In fact, I become conscious of it almost every time I go to a show -- occasionally there are soem black people at shows I attend, and certainly you can expect diversity at a jazz show, for example, but the diffusion of music away from a monolithic mainstream has led to some unexpected and (I think) kind of depressing outcomes.

Why am I thnking about this? I guess it's a concern that left to my own homeostasis that I will drift toward segregated entertainment events, or so it would seem. I live 7 miles from the center of a large, racially diverse urban area, I consider myself socailly liberal and realtively open-minded, yet I have isolated myself from a more diverse racial experience. And I think it's not right, but I don't know what to do about it.

Finger Exercises

U had fun yesterday rebuilding a toilet. I had so much fun, in fact, that I may do it again today (well maybe not today, but tomorrow for sure.)
I don't consider myself to be handy. In fact, I'm pretty far from handy. Witness the fact that I made six trips to Home Depot yesterday. That's right, six trips. All I knew is that the toilet downstairs never stopped running and needed fixing. First I thought it was the float ball and arm -- I first tried adjusting, to no avail, then I decided to replace the ball and arm (trip one). No good -- didn't work. So it's obviously something with the valve component that fills the toilet. So off to Home Depot again (trip 2) for a new valve. I picked out he least expensive valve I could find, a FluidMaster 400A. Brought it home to discover there were no instructions in side. This should have been a tip-off that something was awry with this particular package. But I'm a modern guy, if there's some piece of information I need, I go to the Internet, and within a minute I have the instruction sheet downloaded. Of course this PDF is set up for 8.5x11 printing, so when I print it, the instructions are in about 5 pt type. I'm suddenly becoming very conscious of my eyesight slipping.
So I open the patient up, drain all the water, and begin the operation. The first thing is to disconnect the toilet flush handle. As soon as I grasp it, the end of the arm disintegrates in my hand. Off to Home Depot for a new handle (trip 3). Return with the handle. Continue the disassembly, then begin the installation. When I get the new valve installed, I see that the supply line in to the toilet won't work with the new valve, and in fact the directions very plainly state that you shouldn't use the old feed line fitting. So it's off to Home Depot for a new supply line (trip #4 -- as an aside, the Home Depot is about 1.5 miles from my home. One traffic light. I guess that's why this wasn't as onerous as it sounds.) I select a new supply line, return home to complete the task and find that the valve package I bought is missing more than the directions; it's missing a crucial washer. So I take the 3/4-installed valve out, box it up, return it to Home Depot (trip #5). Now I have a complete package (with fully legible directions) and I see exactly how this thing is supposed to come together. I complete the installation, and with some minor tweaking, have a toilet that no longer leaks. Of course I had to return the float ball and arm to Home Depot for a refund (trip #6).
There are any number of ways in which this could be interpreted as ridiculous behavior. Particularly in the fact that I got in my car, started and drove that short distance, then drove back. And ecological disaster! Yet there's not accounting for it in that way (not directly, not yet), so I get away with it. It's truly toxic, but I was having fun -- I was learning, challenging myself and my assumptions about myself. I was driven by that immediate sense in the present, with a goal of not wasting water (certainly a positive on the ecological scale -- I read that a leaky toilet wasted enough water to fill a swimming pool in one year -- I believe it.)
I want to regain some of the ecological consciousness I had in the 80s, then lost. Like a lot of people, I think the ecological paradigm needs some rethinking, but the time to rework a lot of our daily practices fast approaches.

War is a Racket

Quite by accident yesterday, I discovered something about a name that I've seen since I was a kid, but I knew nothing about the person. On Route 420 in Delaware County, I 'm not sure what little town it's on -- it might by Holmes -- there's the General Smedley D. Butler US Marine Corps training center. I remember driving past there in 1973, when the Watergate hearings were on. I remember being somehow scared by the presence of a military installation -- this was but months after the formal "end" of the Vietnam war, and the country was tumbling into chaos over Watergate. At any rate, the other day I looked at my WinMX client, and one of the user names was Smedley Butler. I immediately googled him and the first link was this interesting piece. I don't think I ever expected a Marine General to write so candidly about his perceptions. He affirms the lesson that all may know, but so few seem to really take to heart -- war is about profit. It is about how the few manipulate the many to believe their cause is just so that the few can make enormous profits. Period. End of story.
Quite a character. Brings to mind Wesley Clark today. Somebody who knows the real deal. Although the times are different, it's time somebody steps forward and tells the truth.

Success (!?)

I think I finally have wrestled Blogger into submission. That was, quite literally, my experience. I had to fight with this thing, and we were inflicting damage on each other. Well certainly some damage was inflicted on me. My heart rate is till elevated from the seemingly useless effort I had to exert to get this blog established at the address that I wanted it, with no duplication. Part of it was my own fault (typo in the original URL) but the way in which the Blogger dashboard presents information -- it's hard to tell what's what. Oh well, that's what learning is all about. Remaking neuronal pathways -- it's rarely pleasant.

I was playing this morning with LinkedIn . I had a very visceral experience of the power of social networks -- 14,000 contacts. And I have invested zero in proactively generating this. Now I'm turning it into an experiment -- see where it goes.

It looks like I'm moving closer to getting a job offer. If this pulls through this way, it's nothing short of miraculous. That would be success! Of course this morning I was having so much fun with job hunting that I didn't want to to end. I also found SimplyHired, which is also very cool -- really what I've been looking for. The job search process certainly isn't what it used to be.

It shouldn't be this hard

For the past week I've been wrestling with the Blogger interface. It is not intuitive at all. I know I've made things worse by being impetuous and trying to recreate things that didn't need to be recreated, but every time I come to a screen where I expect to be able to do something, I end up not being able to do that thing. I think somebody in charge needs to actually walk through a user’s experience of the site and take note of the frequent logical snarls you're likely to run into.

I've been thinking a lot about what I would write about. Most of my experience with blogs -- the really personal once I've read -- have either been about politics or technology. (mostly politics, though.) They daily news spew provides enough grist for the proverbial mill, I guess, and it's easy (well, it seems easy to those who are good at it) to be linked into a self-reinforcing network which will pick up ideas and themes in commentary and carry them forward. It's an impressive ecosystem, which I've observed closely on the left, and which I'm sure is paralleled on the right. The fortunate thing is that it's been an opportunity to tap into the vanguard of progressive thinking in a structured and rational way, and feel like your not missing anything, because the network you're tapping into is so large and has such disparate focus, that very little if anything can slip through.
I want to use this blog to re-find my voice. The strident voice that was shouting on the Well, lo those many years ago, about the intersection of politics and technology. There are so many levels at which this operates. Part of my praxis deals with the definition of work, and how the multi-mediation and cellularization of work affects politics. I still don't know too many people who are addressing this. If I look at the state of politics right now, I think we're still in a weird, interstitial state. I think that politics has regressed -- it's still fighting the agrarian versus industrial war. Hmmm, that's interesting, I hadn't thought of that before -- this Red State - Blue State tension is an eerie echo of the Civil War. Now I'm not an historian or sociologist, and I'm sure not the first person with such a facile analysis, but I don't think the nation has even gotten this notion that we've evolved through the knowledge economy into what I call "the design service economy". There's a lot to explore there. It's a platform, I'm happy.

Back in Business (re-redux)

I posted an essay by the title "Back in Business" last Monday. I then proceeded to lose access to the account on Blogger. I haven't run into anything this stupid for a while -- I must have made a type when I entered the e-mail addressed to be tied to the account, and then I couldn't access it anymore. The Blogger automated help robot was NO HELP. So I took matters ion my own hands, and started a NEW account. Over at http://designaticipation.blogger.com there is a solitary posting, and ever more shall be so.

When I lost access, I took it as an omen, although an omen of what, I don't know. Maybe I should become a Blogger. But I have plans! I finally want to develop a single all-encompassing web presence into which I can pout all my thinking -- content, opinions, connections -- just like I wrote about 12 years ago. Building the prototype of ideas that were way ahead of their time when I first mapped them out, but which are no read. Ideas that have lain dormant for lo these many years, and which now may blossom, in some form. There are so many things to tie together -- I'm certainly juiced at the prospect. Additionally, there's the chance to add media -- podcasting or videocasting, or whatever.

For the past 10-and-a-half years I have mostly devoted my energies to getting to a job outside my home, working there, and then spending effort to get home.

I calculated recently that in that span I spent over 100 solid days commuting. I thought to myself that I wanted those days back. Maybe with interest. But how?

The remarkable fact is that Design Anticipation never died; certainly not after its apparent doom on October of '94. I kept the torch burning, somehow, lo these many years. I found myself despairing all too often that I didn't have access to making any part of the dream come true. I had to do what I had to do. Get out of debt, buy some real estate, establish a retirement account. All the things that were not happening when Design Anticipation was an active concern. And I may yet need to work to develop a constituency and an equilibrium in my life.

As I transition from an intense full-time role into a more...shall we say...contemplative period, I'm surprised and heartened at the amount of flow I'm experiencing -- at least at the moment. Life is my oyster right now. I'm really happy. There's joy in my heart. These are truly unusual assertions; it's certainly not consistent with my experience of the past few years -- in fact very little of the past 10.5 years of engagement in the full-time workforce.

I'm fortunate to be energized and hopeful, rather than disillusioned and burnt-out. I've worked hard to develop an optimistic sense -- it's certainly learned optimism, developed and encouraged by numerous influences and stimuli, not the least of which is the amazing network of loving and supportive partners I've had the good fortune to associate with over the course of my life time.

So now I set off on a new quest..to be a new Renaissance person. I think that's what Bucky Fuller, to who this blog owes its title (if somewhat obliquely) set out to teach us -- how to be interested in all the vital areas that encompass "making the world work for everyone, with no one left out." The degree of engagement with matters in a spherically-defined realm -- 360 by 360 in every direction -- and how to develop adequate degrees of freedom to function inside these every-widening spheres. (And now I'm feeling totally self conscious and pretentious -- renaissance person indeed!)

There is so much more to develop and so many more ideas to weave into the web of wonder. I just want to have fun. And learn something in my own way. We shall see...