Aardnoot - Gebruikersbijdragen [nl]

Sjabloon:Publikaties

2022-02-10T15:27:00Z

Martien: |format=ul

{{PAGENAME}} heeft de volgende publikaties op zijn of haar naam staan:
{{#ask:
[[Heeft auteur::{{PAGENAME}}]]
|format=ul
}}

Sjabloon:Publikaties

2022-02-10T15:23:59Z

Martien: += |Titel

{{PAGENAME}} heeft de volgende publikaties op zijn of haar naam staan:
{{#ask:
[[Heeft auteur::{{PAGENAME}}]]
|?Titel
}}

Sjabloon:Publikaties

2022-02-10T15:21:49Z

Martien: {{#ask:…}}

{{PAGENAME}} heeft de volgende publikaties op zijn of haar naam staan:
{{#ask:
[[Heeft auteur::{{PAGENAME}}]]
}}

Sjabloon:Publikatie

2018-03-22T12:09:37Z

Martien: paginas

<noinclude>
Dit is het sjabloon 'Publikatie'. Gebruik het op de volgende wijze:
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|Heeft als subtitel=
|Is van soort=
|Heeft kaftbeeld=
|Heeft auteur=
|Is geschreven in taal=
|Heeft als oorspronkelijke taal=
|Heeft als oorspronkelijke titel=
|Is vertaald door=
|Is gepubliceerd in jaar=
|Heeft bibliografische druk=
|Heeft trefwoorden=
|Is uitgegeven door=
|Is uitgegeven in plaats=
|Is uitgegeven in staat of provincie=
|Heeft ISBN=
|Online=
|Heeft NUR-code=
|Heeft aantal paginas=
|Is voor het eerst verschenen op=
}}
</pre>
Bewerk de pagina om de sjabloontekst te bekijken.
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! style="text-align: center; background-color:#ccccff;" colspan="2" |<big>{{PAGENAME}}</big>
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|-
!{{label|Auteur(s)}}
|{{#arraymap:{{{Heeft auteur|}}}|,|x|[[Heeft auteur::x]]}}
|-
!{{label|Taal}}
|[[Is geschreven in taal::{{{Is geschreven in taal|}}}]]
|-
!{{label|Type}}
|[[Is van soort::{{{Is van soort}}}]]
|-
!{{label|Trefwoorden}}
|{{#arraymap:{{{Heeft trefwoorden|}}}|,|x|[[Heeft trefwoorden::x|x]]}}
|-
!{{label|Pagina's}}
|{{ #ifeq: {{{Heeft aantal paginas| }}}||''onbekend''|[[Heeft aantal paginas::{{{Heeft aantal paginas}}}]] }}
|-
!{{label|Download}}
|{{ #ifeq: {{{Online| }}} ||| [{{{Online}}} {{PAGENAME}}] }}
|}
[[Categorie:Publikatie]]
</includeonly>

Don't Make me Think!

2018-03-22T12:08:48Z

Martien: paginas

{{Publikatie
|Heeft als subtitel=A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
|Is van soort=Boek
|Heeft kaftbeeld=dont-make-me-think-book-cover.jpg
|Heeft auteur=Steve Krug
|Is geschreven in taal=Engels
|Heeft als oorspronkelijke taal=Engels
|Is gepubliceerd in jaar=2000
|Heeft bibliografische druk=1
|Heeft trefwoorden=web usability, interaction design
|Is uitgegeven door=New Riders Publishing
|Is uitgegeven in plaats=Indianapolis
|Is uitgegeven in staat of provincie=Indiana
|Heeft ISBN=0789723107
|Heeft aantal paginas=195
|Is voor het eerst verschenen op=2000/10/01
}}
{{PAGENAME}} is een helder boek en benadert [[Web Usability]] met gezond verstand.

{{PAGENAME}} bevat veel {{ps}} die gebruikt worden in {{pt}}. [[parel:categorie:Don't Make Me Think!]] verzamelt alle in het Nederlands vertaalde {{ps}} uit dit boek.

One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

2017-08-15T08:12:23Z

Martien: typo

#REDIRECT [[One From Many]]

One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

2017-08-15T08:11:45Z

Martien: #REDIRECT One Form Many

#REDIRECT [[One Form Many]]

MediaWiki:Common.css

2012-01-01T11:35:06Z

Martien: /* CSS placed here will be applied to all skins */ body, html { font-size:12pt; font-family: Sun, Optima, Verdana, sans-serif; }

/** CSS die hier wordt geplaatst heeft invloed op alle skins */

body, html { font-size:12pt; font-family: Sun, Optima, Verdana, sans-serif; }

Nieuwe producten bedenken

2010-12-06T14:18:40Z

Martien: Toelichting++

{{Publikatie
|Heeft als subtitel=De effectieve VOORT® innovatiemethode
|Is van soort=Boek
|Heeft kaftbeeld=Nieuwe-producten-bedenken-kaft.jpg
|Heeft auteur=Gijs van Wulfen
|Heeft trefwoorden=voort, innovatie, ontwikkelen, innovatiemethode, methode, marketing, productmanagement, productontwikkeling
|Heeft aantal paginas=328
|Is geschreven in taal=Nederlands
|Heeft als oorspronkelijke taal=Nederlands
|Is gepubliceerd in jaar=2006
|Heeft ISBN=90-430-177-49
|Heeft NUR-code=801
|Is voor het eerst verschenen op=2006
}}
Een praktische reisgids voor organisaties die willen groeien.

Een praktische reisgids voor innovatie
Juist in een recessie schrikken organisaties wakker en beseffen meer dan ooit dat ze zich moeten onderscheiden met aansprekende producten en diensten: “we moeten innoveren”. Innovatie is actueler dan ooit. Maar hoe pak je dit aan? Waar tover je ineens baanbrekende nieuwe ideeën vandaan? En als er goede nieuwe producten worden bedacht, dan stranden ze vaak op de weerbarstige realiteit of het topmanagement strooit roet in het eten.

Deze tweede editie van het boek Nieuwe Producten Bedenken (april 2009) biedt een oplossing voor iedereen die nieuwe producten of diensten wil ontwikkelen. Gijs van Wulfen heeft een duidelijk en praktisch toepasbaar stappenplan waarmee je in twintig weken aantrekkelijke productideeën kunt bedenken en uitwerken. Bovendien, en dat is misschien nog wel het belangrijkst, legt hij uit hoe je intern een breed draagvlak creëert voor je nieuwe product.

De succesvolle innovatiemethode heet VOORT® en werkt als een routekaart. Aan de hand daarvan ga je met anderen uit de organisatie op ontdekkingsreis. Deze reis bestaat uit vijf stappen: Vertrekken, Ontdekken, Ontwikkelen, Reflecteren en Terugkeren (VOORT). Aan het eind van de reis kom je terug met zinvolle souvenirs. Deze methode is bij diverse organisaties, zoals Sanoma Uitgevers, Euroforum, Famostar, AB Oost, ProRail, NEA International, Dremefa (BoBike) en Univé-VGZ-IZA-TRIAS in gebruik en wordt als zeer effectief ervaren. Nieuw in deze editie is de Univé praktijkcase die wordt uitgewerkt. Je kunt dus lezen hoe productinnovatie met de VOORT®-methode in de praktijk werkt. Er is een speciale Nederlandstalige VOORT innovatiesite met de landkaart. Ook is er een Engelstalige website rond VOORT.

Nieuwe producten bedenken geeft praktische voorbeelden, checklists, tips en adviezen en bevat aansprekende cartoons die van dit boek niet alleen een handboek en naslagwerk maken, maar ook een inspiratiebron voor iedereen die zich bezighoudt met productinnovatie.

Nieuwe producten bedenken

2010-12-06T14:18:00Z

Martien: 1.0

Bestand:Nieuwe-producten-bedenken-kaft.jpg

2010-12-06T14:15:01Z

Martien: Deze tweede editie van het boek Nieuwe Producten Bedenken (april 2009) biedt een oplossing voor iedereen die nieuwe producten of diensten wil ontwikkelen. Gijs van Wulfen heeft een duidelijk en praktisch toepasbaar stappenplan waarmee je in twintig weken

Deze tweede editie van het boek Nieuwe Producten Bedenken (april 2009) biedt een oplossing voor iedereen die nieuwe producten of diensten wil ontwikkelen. Gijs van Wulfen heeft een duidelijk en praktisch toepasbaar stappenplan waarmee je in twintig weken aantrekkelijke productideeën kunt bedenken en uitwerken. Bovendien, en dat is misschien nog wel het belangrijkst, legt hij uit hoe je intern een breed draagvlak creëert voor je nieuwe product.

De succesvolle innovatiemethode heet VOORT® en werkt als een routekaart. Aan de hand daarvan ga je met anderen uit de organisatie op ontdekkingsreis. Deze reis bestaat uit vijf stappen: Vertrekken, Ontdekken, Ontwikkelen, Reflecteren en Terugkeren (VOORT). Aan het eind van de reis kom je terug met zinvolle souvenirs.

Gijs van Wulfen

2010-12-06T14:12:37Z

Martien: 1.0

{{Auteur
|Voornaam=Gijs
|Tussenvoegsel=van
|Achternaam=Wulfen
|Wikipedia=Nee
|Pasfoto=Gijs-van-Wulfen.jpg
|Heeft trefwoorden=voort, innovatie, innovatiemethode, brainstormen, productinnovatie
|Land van oorsprong=Nederland
|Website=http://www.nieuweproductenbedenken.nl/
}}
Nieuweproductenbedenken.nl is een initiatief van Gijs van Wulfen. In 2006 schreef hij het praktische innovatieboek Nieuwe Producten Bedenken, waarin hij voor het eerst de VOORT® innovatiemethode presenteert. Met deze unieke innovatiemethode kun je op een praktische manier snel nieuwe spraakmakende producten & diensten bedenken. En tegelijkertijd hiervoor intern draagvlak verwerven. De methode wordt gebruikt door zowel grote als kleinere organisaties. Niet alleen in het bedrijfsleven, maar ook in de culturele sector of in de zorgsector.

Zijn missie is om zoveel mogelijk mensen te inspireren en praktisch te helpen om zelf een vliegende start te maken met innovatie. Hij is de oprichter van de VOORT Innovatie Groep. En helpt organisaties als innovatiefacilitator om nieuwe producten en diensten te bedenken en zo innovatie te versnellen.

Bestand:Gijs-van-Wulfen.jpg

2010-12-06T14:10:01Z

Martien: Bron: http://www.ondernemenintwente.eu/sprekers

Bron: http://www.ondernemenintwente.eu/sprekers

Complementary Currencies

2010-09-23T11:12:41Z

Martien: Sander de Rijke

Overview of complementary currencies, compiled by [[Sander de Rijke]].

==Contents==
::{{sectie|Barter|0}}

Complementary Currencies/Barter

2010-09-23T11:11:05Z

Martien: Eerste aanzet

==General Description==

A ‘trade exchange’ or [[barter]] is traditionally understood as a commercial organization providing a (online) trade platform and running a bookkeeping system for participating businesses not involving cash-money. The name ‘barter’ is to some extent confusing as barter is strictly speaking “[[direct reciprocal trade]]”; swapping one item for another. However direct barter has its limitations: when one of two parties in a transaction has nothing desired by the other, no transaction takes place at all. Modern barters use a business-to-business currency ([[trade credits]]) as intermediary for transactions to take place. The members buy and sell products and services among each other using this internal ‘[[business to business]] [[currency]]’. Participants in [[barter]] thus have the ability to purchase goods and services from other members utilizing their trade credits next to their ordinary cash transactions. All participants in a barter start with an account balance of zero. Each corporation in the barter system has an account that is debited when purchases are made, and credited when sales are made. [[Lietaer]] (1999: 142) speaks of a ‘[[mutual credit]] systems’ for such arrangements.

All barters are commercial, that is for-profit, organizations offering a [[complementary currency]] to businesses to trade mutually. Nevertheless two types of barter can be distinguished: commercial barter and corporate barter. Corporate barter is intended for large to very large corporations and multinationals, and involves the transfer of only large sums of money. The barter company receives a certain percentage of every transaction. Active International, established in New York, is the largest corporate barter company today. In this article we will mainly focus on commercial bartering. Commercial bartering is intended for Small Medium Enterprises, and involves smaller transactions. The Swiss [[WIR]] Bank was the first and by far the largest commercial barter in the world.

==Purpose==

[[Barter]] is a private individual initiative for businesses to strengthen themselves collectively, not involving government’s financial support or dependence on the banks for loans. By using a complementary currency, a shortage of cash during financial crisis and the instability of currencies is avoided. Modern day barter has evolved considerably to a banking-method used to realize increasing sales, conserving ordinary cash, moving excess inventory, and making use of excess production capacity for businesses around the world.

In case of the [[WIR]], [[WIR credit]] is designed to stimulate the local economy (that is Switzerland only) as well as to alleviate economic downturn. [[WIR credit]] enables businesses to increase their purchasing power and, moreover, keeps money circulating within their own ranks. [[WIR]] is essentially a community currency because its circulation is restricted to a specific area where businesses accept payments in [[WIR]] (Studer 1998). Making use of [[WIR]] currency prevents currency from flowing outside this specific area.

==Design Criteria==

===Support Medium===
Because modern barter is essentially running a bookkeeping system or administration, no ‘physical’ money is involved. In Barter, an organization just keeps track of the transactions taking place. In case of the [[WIR]], WIR-credit is simply electronic money. Since 1995, it is possible to make payments using a single plastic charge card rather than using cheques (Douthwaite 1999: Ch 2). In 2008 Internet-banking became available. Because no cash-payments are involved in a transaction of [[WIR]] currency, the [[WIR]] is free of theft and counterfeiting (Studer 1998: Ch 1).

===Function (medium of exchange, store of value, standard of value)===
Barter was invented to provide businesses with a means of payment during economic downturns, when ordinary currency is scarce. Hence, barter was invented to serve the function of trading only. In mutual-credit systems, no interest is received on positive trade credit balances nor is interest paid on negative balances, as the balance would no longer add up to zero. That doesn’t mean no mechanism are at play that encourage saving or trading; remarkably, the WIR has implemented a transaction fee, discouraging exchanges.

With regard to the function of standard of value, every WIR credit is equivalent to 1 Swiss Franc (CHF) (Lietaer 1999: 142). The obvious advantage is that it makes multiple pricing mechanisms redundant and allows for combined payments (WIR-Credit and Francs). Not all suppliers accept 100 percent payment in WIR currency. Combined payments are more common where goods and services are paid for part in cash and part in WIR (Studer 1998: Ch 1). Members that agree to accept at least 30% of the payment in WIR, are referred to as ‘official members’ Those members, that cannot guarantee a payment of at least 30% in WIR, are considered ‘unofficial’ members.

===Issuing Procedure===
WIR credit can be obtained in two ways. The first option is by contracting a loan in WIR credit from the WIR Bank’s head office in Basel. The second option to obtain WIR credit is to sell goods or services and receiving WIR-credit in return from the buyer. The buyer’s bank account is debited and the seller’s bank account is simultaneously credited by the same amount. A debit in WIR currency needs to be reimbursed with sales to a participant in the network in the same currency, or settled in national money (Lietaer 2008: 3).

Despite its denomination in Swiss Francs, WIR-Credit cannot be redeemed for Swiss Francs (Douthwaite 1999: Ch. 2). This design criterion guarantees that money remains within the cooperative circle.

Instead, WIR-credit is backed by the inventory and assets of the organizations joining the WIR. Strictly speaking, the assets of the businesses are ‘liquefied’; businesses monetize their unused capacities and excess inventories. Loans are backed by collateral, usually real estate. As such, debt retirement is assured by the enterprise contracting a loan. In the WIR collateral is a requirement for businesses to run a debt. If a debt is not paid off within a particular timeframe, the WIR can seize assets of the debtor. Moreover, a debtor pays interest on the loan contracted with the WIR organization. According to Douthwaite & Wagman (1999: 15) collateral is an important design aspect of the WIR. They assert that WIR’s insistence on collateral is partially an explanation for the survival of WIR where other similar systems disappeared or failed. In several occasions, some participating businesses abused the barter system by spending trade credits well beyond their capacity to earn them back, resulting in lack of trust and failure of the barter (Greco 2001: 88).

===Funding and Cost Recuperation===
Most Commercial exchanges make money by charging a commission on each transaction either all on the buy side, all on the sell side, or a combination of both. The WIR has installed several cost recovery mechanisms to finance its organization. First of all, a fee or levy on every transaction is installed. This fee is 0.6% for official members and 1.2% for non-official members and is paid in WIR-credit (Douthwaite & Wagman 1999: 15; Lietaer 1999: 142). Additionally a service charge of 1.75% on mortgages is implemented to pay for the costs of the organization (Douthwaite & Wagman 1999: 14). A third source of income is the interest paid on loans by businesses participating in the WIR. Although Enz and Zimmerman were inspired by Silvio Gesell, according to whom money should be free of interest, the ‘freigeldtheorie’ was abandoned by 1952 allowing low interest-rates on loans provided by the WIR (WIR Bank 2010). Again a distinction is made between official members and unofficial members. Official members pay a charge of 3.5% on account loans, whilst unofficial members pay a charge of 2.5% (Douthwaite & Wagman 1999: 15). The interest-rate ranges from 1% to 1.5% (Lietaer 2008: 3).

==Implementation and Origin==

Modern barter emerged with the founding of the Swiss WIR Bank. The Swiss WIR Bank was the first barter system and one of the largest still existing barters at present. Werner Zimmerman and Paul Enz established it in 1934 together with 14 others and was modeled after an exchange and clearing system in Scandinavia and the Baltic (Defila 1994). It was initially named the ‘Freiwirtschaftsring Genossenschaft’ (free economic circle cooperative) until it changed its name to ‘the WIR Bank’ in 1998. WIR is an abbreviation of ‘Wirtschaftsring’ (business circle) and also the German word for ‘we’, emphasizing its community aspect (Greco 2001: 67). The direct cause for establishing the WIR was the shortage of conventional currency after the stock market crash of 1929. By joining the WIR participating small and medium-sized enterprises were enabled to make use of WIR units to continue their transactions. Having obtained WIR credit, one can spend them at businesses participating in the WIR system. The WIR catalogue is published to give an overview of products and service supplied. Hence it is said that barter organization perform two basic functions: acting as a clearinghouse (keeping accounts of members’ transactions and trade balances) and brokering (actively connecting buyer and seller).

==Impact and Significance==

The WIR had proven to be a quite effective way for businesses to work together. A solid business model seems to be largely responsible for this; especially, active brokering, limits to debit and involvement of a professional organization with sufficient funds.

===Size and Growth===
In the 1960’s and 1970’s new commercial and corporate barter systems emerged such as Efficio (Paris - France), BarterXchange (Singapore) and BarterCard International. Euro Barter Business (Germany) and RES (Belgium) are two significant barters that emerged more recently. Because barter is essentially running a bookkeeping system, the information technology revolution provided the opportunity to implement barter systems much easier and faster (Lietaer 2008: 4). The availability of computers at low costs, for accounting and tracking barter transactions spurred the growth of barters worldwide (Greco 2001: 87). New techniques, such as the invention of the plastic (credit) card also simplified the introduction of barter systems. Despite, it should be noted that 90% of all emerging barters become defunct within its first year of existence (Wallach 2010).
Today around 400.000 businesses in the world are involved in a barter exchange (IRTA 2010). Almost all Fortune 500 businesses are included (Wallach 2010). There are approximately 750 commercial and corporate barter companies serving all parts of the world. In Time magazine, turnover is estimated at US$ 10 billion in 2008, with an expected increase of 15% for 2009 (Adams 2009; IRTA 2010). BarterCard (at the time world’s largest barter) is responsible for US$ 2 billion. Eileen Hee (2010) of BarterXchange asserts the global barter industry is now worth US$ 3 billion.

Around 135 of the better exchange systems organized themselves in the IRTA (International Reciprocal Trade Organization), a global branch organization assuring the accountability of its members. The IRTA has made efforts to improve the image of bartering. In the past some fraudulent barters were established to avoid taxes or its initiators took from the system without delivering anything in return. Due to IRTA’s efforts the IRS has introduced a separate IRS tax filling form, and stresses that all barters are part of the formal economy and compliant to tax laws. The National Association of Trade Exchanges (NATE) is another significant branch organization representing the interest of the barter industry.

Most barters are members of international trading networks as well. These provide them with opportunities to access larger, global marketplaces to buy and sell within using trade credits. The Universal Currency (UC) as part of IRTA, and the BANC currency as part of NATE are examples.

Although new barters emerged in recent decades, the WIR remains by far the largest barter organization worldwide. By 1993 it had 77.000 participants (17% of all Swiss businesses) with an annual turnover of 2.5 billion Swiss francs (1.5 billion Euro)(Greco 2001: 67; Lietaer 1999: 142). By the year 2000 this was estimated to be 85.000 and 20% of all Swiss Businesses (Valentini 2000: 4). However, when considering Switzerland’s GDP of $ 242.5 billion in 1993 (±255 billion CHF), a turnover of 2.5 CHF billion represents merely 1% of GDP, and hence seems not to be very significant to the Swiss economy (Nationmaster 2010).

Despite astonishing growth in recent decades, barter organizations also have been confronted with its deficiencies. The major drawback of barter systems, like the WIR, is its inability to convert trade credit into conventional currency. In addition the barter market is becoming saturated. For this reason its not likely for new barter systems to emerge and barter has proven to have limits to growth.

===Achievements and Impediments===
The question that off course remains is whether barter organizations succeeded to realize their purposes, besides profit. After all, size and growth make no sense if they do not realize what they were initially designed for. The purpose of commercial barter organizations is essentially to strengthen the local economy and SME-businesses (against multinationals) especially during economic hardship by providing a complementary means of payment.

James Stodder has done extensive research on the effects of WIR-credit on the local (Swiss) economy. It turned out that WIR currency acts counter-cyclical to conventional currency making it a truly complementary currency. During economic and financial crises (when conventional currency was scarce), the volume of businesses in WIR credit expanded substantially, only to decrease with economic recovery when conventional currency becomes available. The use of WIR credit relieves the effects of conventional money shortages and financial disruptions for businesses in the WIR. Consequently, WIR secures investment and economic activity. This because WIR is never in short supply as opposed to conventional currency; with every transaction WIR money is automatically created (Douthwaite 1999: Ch 2). Stodder’s (1998; 2005; 2007) studies on the WIR show that WIR currency has contributed to more economic stability for the Swiss economy. It would mean that WIR actually helped the central bank in its efforts to stabilize the economy (Lietaer 2008).

==Sources==

[[Eileen Hee|Hee, Eileen]] (2010) ‘Barter Trade your way through recession’, BarterXchange. http://www.barterxchange.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=253&Itemid=1 (Retrieved 06-07-2010)

[[Heidi Defila|Defila, Heidi]] (1994) ‘60 Years of the WIR Economic Circle Cooperative. Origins and Ideology of the Wirtschaftsring’. Wir Magazine, September 1994. (Translated from the German by Thomas Greco). Available: http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/RDavies/arian/wir.html

Douthwaite, Richard J. & Dan Wagman (1999) Barataria. A Community Exchange Network for the Third System. Utrecht: Strohalm.

Douthwaite, Richard J. (1999) The Ecology of Money. Devon: Green Books

[[Thomas Greco|Greco, Thomas H. Jr.]] (2001) Money. Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

IRTA (2010) Introduction Movie. http://www.irta.com/ (Retrieved 07-07-2010)

[[Bernard Lietaer|Lietaer, Bernard A.]] (1999) The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World. Post Falls: Century Publishers.

[[Bernard Lietaer|Lietaer, Bernard A.]] (2008) The Banking Crisis: What Can Business Do Now? http://www.lietaer.com/images/B2B_currency_1.pdf (retrieved 21-05-2010)

Nationmaster (2010) Economy Statistics. GDP (1993) by country.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp-economy-gdp&date=1993 (retrieved 07-07-2010)

Studer, Tobias (1998) Wir und unserer Volkswirtschaft. Basel: WIR. (Translated from the German by Philip H. Beard, 2006 ‘Wir and the Swiss National Economy’ Rohnert Park: Sanoma State University). Available: http://www.lulu.com/content/268895
 Stodder, James P. (1998) ‘Corporate Barter and Macroeconomic Stabilization’. International Journal of Community Currency Research, 2 (2)

Stodder, James P. (2005) Reciprocal Exchange Networks. Implications for Macroeconomic Stability. WirPlus Magazine, October 2000

Stodder, James P. (2007) Residual Barter Networks and Macro-Economic Stability; Switzerland’s Wirtschaftsring. http://www.lietaer.com/images/Stodder_WIR_paper2009.pdf

Adams, William Lee (2009) Bartering: Have Hotel, Need Haircut. Time, Monday November 2nd, 2009. Available: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1931665,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

Valentini, Ezio (2000) Switzerland’s WIR System and Barter Worldwide. Available: http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/wir_and_barter.pdf

Wallach, David (2010) Interview with David Wallach, IRTA President, 08-07-2010.

[[WIR Bank]] (2010) Geschichte. http://www.wir.ch/index.cfm?CBD9201D3DBB11D6B9950001020761E5 (retrieved 21-05-2010). (In German)

Thomas Greco

2010-09-23T11:09:55Z

Martien: #REDIRECT Thomas H. Greco jr.

#REDIRECT [[Thomas H. Greco jr.]]

Complementary Currencies

2010-09-23T10:59:53Z

Martien: Nulde versie

Overview of complementary currencies, compiled by [Sander de Rijke].

==Contents==
::{{sectie|Barter|0}}

Michael Bierut

2010-06-28T07:39:54Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Auteur
|Voornaam=Michael
|Achternaam=Bierut
|Wikipedia=Nee
|Pasfoto=Michael-bierut.jpg
|Heeft trefwoorden=design, ontwerp, marketing, identity, creativity
|Website=http://willsherwood.com/?p=405
}}
From: [http://vizthink.com/blog/2009/11/16/michael-bierut-5-design-secrets-from-86-notebooks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%253A+VizthinkBlog+%2528vizthink+blog%2529 VizThink Blog » Blog Archive » Michael Bierut: 5 Design Secrets from 86 Notebooks]:
#Listen first, then design
#Don’t avoid the obvious
#The problem contains the solution
#*New York Times building sign
#Indulge your obsessions
#*E.g. MAD font and alphabet of squares and circles for Museum of Arts and Design.
#*Go for it and work it out.
#Love is the answer
#*Remember who you're doing it for
#*Remember why you do it
#*And then you'll always be happy, I assure you.
#*E.g. void space above upper shelf of kids L!BRARY filled iwth kids faces

Bestand:Michael-bierut.jpg

2010-06-28T07:37:11Z

Martien: Bron: http://willsherwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/michael-bierut.jpg

Bron: http://willsherwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/michael-bierut.jpg

Springplank naar Creativiteit

2010-04-12T10:28:02Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Publikatie
|Heeft als subtitel=Je houdt niet op met spelen omdat je oud wordt, je wordt oud omdat je ophoudt met spelen
|Is van soort=Boek
|Heeft kaftbeeld=Springplank naar Creativiteit.png
|Heeft auteur=Ton Planken
|Heeft trefwoorden=creativiteit
|Heeft aantal paginas=144
|Is geschreven in taal=Nederlands
|Heeft als oorspronkelijke taal=Nederlands
}}
Met die tekst op de achterkant roep ik mijn lezers op om kinderlijk te durven denken-en-doen in zakelijke activiteiten.

Zoek in dit boek niet naar verhandelingen over neurotransmitters, want ik weet absoluut niet hoe ons brein werkt. Ik weet wel wat je er mee kunt doen. En daar gaat het om. Ornithologen weten ook veel meer van vogels dan de vogels zelf, maar ze kunnen niet vliegen!

Wat staat er wel op die 144 pagina's?
Een kippenvel-gedicht op pagina 8, alleszeggende oneliners, knappe illustraties, heerlijke anekdotes, recepten en onmiddellijk-toepasbare tips om boven dat maaiveld uit te komen. Let ook op de paginanummering!

Trakteer uzelf of uw vrienden op dit boek…
Geef het als eindejaarsgeschenk…

Bestand:Springplank naar Creativiteit.png

2010-04-12T10:27:11Z

Martien:

Ton Planken

2010-04-12T10:25:20Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Auteur
|Voornaam=Ton
|Achternaam=Planken
|Wikipedia=Nee
|Pasfoto=Ton-Planken.png
|Heeft trefwoorden=creativiteit, sales, verkoop, taal, theater, taalkunstenaar
|Land van oorsprong=Nederland
|Website=http://www.pezzaz.nl/
}}
[http://www.pezzaz.nl/ Ton "pezzaz" Planken] doet trainingen met perspectief. Een lijst van gevleugelde uitspraken van Ton:
*Als je niet kunt lachen moet je geen winkel beginnen.
*De klant koopt geen voorwerp maar een voorstelling.
*GTBTGY—Get Them Before They Get You.
*Eis van jezelf meer dan de ander verwacht.
*Onze excuses zijn onze limieten.
*PEZZAZ.
*Voorbereiding is 90% van het resultaat.
*Beter een einde met pijn dan pijn zonder einde.
*Heb haast als je tijd hebt, dan heb je tijd als je haast hebt.
*HINBWJZ HIBWDADDJZ (Het is niet belangrijk wat je zegt. Het is belangrijk wat de ander ''denkt'' dat je zegt).
*What you expect is what you get.
*Wie niet meegaat met de tijd gaat mettertijd.
*Skischans. ''geen idee wat dit ook alweer was''
*Geheim van succes: gewone dingen ongewoon goed doen.
*Verraad sijpelt uit all poriën.
*Peuren.
*Niet het vele is goed maar het goede is veel.

Bestand:Ton-Planken.png

2010-04-12T10:23:15Z

Martien:

Collective Intelligence

2010-03-21T12:19:29Z

Martien: {{publikatie}}

{{Publikatie
|Heeft als subtitel=Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace
|Is van soort=Boek
|Heeft kaftbeeld=Collective-Intelligence-Pierre-Levy.gif
|Heeft auteur=Pierre Lévy
|Heeft trefwoorden=nomadic earth, molar technologies, anthropological spaces, collective intellect, informational universe, commodity space, knowledge space, molecular politics, preceding spaces, collective intelligence, agent intellect, territorial space, intelligent city, fourth space, angelic body, intelligent communities, intelligent community, intellectual technologies
|Heeft aantal paginas=277
|Is geschreven in taal=Engels
|Is vertaald door=Robert Bononno
|Heeft ISBN= 0-7382-0261-4
|Is voor het eerst verschenen op=1999/01/01
}}

*Read by Martien van Steenbergen, April-May 2000.
*Survey/Review Copyright © 2000 by Martien van Steenbergen, 2000-05-06.
*Numbers in square brackets refer to corresponding page number, e.g. [13].
*Relevant superscripts1 refer to the corresponding chapter notes in the back of the book.
*{Text in braces are personal notes.}
*{fluidiom} refers to Gerald de Jong's Fluidiom project. Search for "fluid" (not "{fluidiom}, that'll be too restrictive) and you'll find some very interesting thoughts. See also [http://www.fluidiom.com http://www.fluidiom.com].
*{Joy} refers to Bill Joy's article titled "Why the future doesn't need us", published in Wired magazine in May 2000 (Wired 7.05). See also [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html]
*{Kauffman} refers to Stuart Kauffman's book "At home in the Universe", on complexity, self-organization, and emergent complex systems.
*{gossip} refers to Tryllian's "Agents on the move.", see [http://www.tryllian.com http://www.tryllian.com].

===Foreword [vii]===
*Foreword by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Miami, Florida.
*Computers and social theory. [vii]
*Deeply cultural and philosophical, metaphysical and utopian. [vii]
*Douglas Engelbart: computers can be used to augment intellect. [viii]
*Lévy's starting point is grounded in social, economic and political structures. [ix]
*The prosperity of a nation, geographical region, business, or individual depends on their ability to navigate the knowledge space. [ix]
*The Knowledge Space takes precedence over the spaces of earth, territory and commerce that preceded it. [ix]
*Lévy is attempting to map or create a detailed cartography of these spaces and their interrelationship [ix]
*The Knowledge Space is also referred to as the cosmopedia. [ix]
*The cosmopedia, as knowledge space around which the new collective intelligence is organized goes beyond the image and text characteristic of print-based encyclopedias. [ix]
*New computer technologies such as the Internet and World Wide Web will serve to filter and help us navigate knowledge, and enable us t think collectively rather than simply haul masses of information around with us. [x]
*Collective intelligence is a universally distributed intelligence. [xi]
*No one knows everything, and everyone knows something. [xi]
*We are passing from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think). The computer is the instrument that makes this utopian ideal possible. [xi]
*We are moving from a typographic or modern culture into a post-typographic or post-modern culture. The parallels to the transition from Medieval to Renaissance culture--from a largely oral and spoken to a text and print-based culture seam clear. [xi]

===Prologue: The Nomad Planet [xix]===
*This book is intended to promote that development from an anthropological perspective and forge a positive vision. [xxii]
*We have again become nomads. [xxii]
*We are moving from one humanity to another. [xxiii]
*Terra incognita. [xxv]
*Time now is errant, oblique, indeterminate, like that which precedes all origins. [xxv]
*Over the course of several millennia, however, homo habilis became sapiens, crossed a similar threshold, went forth into the unknown, invented the earth, the gods, and the infinite world of signification. [xxvii]
*First, we will have at our disposal simple and practical means for knowing what we are doing as a group. Second, we will be able to manipulate, much more easily than we are able to write, the instruments for collective utterance. [xxviii]

==Collective Intelligence: Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace==

===Introduction [1]===
====Economy [1]====
*The prosperity of a nation, geographical region, business, or individual depends on their ability to navigate the knowledge space. [1]
*Power is now conferred through the optimal management of knowledge, whether it involves technology, science, communication, or our "ethical" relationship with the other. [1]
*The more we are able to form intelligent communities, as open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagination, and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure our success in a highly competitive environment. [1]
*The service sector itself is increasingly coming under siege by a variety of technological objects. It is becoming industrialized, as characterized by the presence of ATMs, web sites, educational software, expert systems, etc. [2]
*Businesses tend to organize themselves in such a way that they are receptive to innovation networks. [2]
*Once the process of renewal slows down, the company or organization is in danger of petrification and extinction. As Michel Serres has written, knowledge has become the new infrastructure. [2]
*Totalitarism collapsed in the face of new forms of mobile and cooperative labor. It was incapable of collective intelligence. [3]
*The continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be the major economic activity throughout the next century. [4]
*Individuals and microcorporations are more capable than large companies of continuous reorganization and optimal enhancement of the individual skills tat are currently the requirements for success. [4]
*We are witnessing the development of complex forms of confrontational interdependence among skill zones that are fluid, delocalized, based on the singularities, and agitated by permanent molecular movements of association and rivalry. [5]
*The ability to rapidly form and reform intelligent communities will become the decisive weapon of regional skill centers competing within a globalized economic space. [5]
====Anthropology [5]====
*What is an anthropological space? It is a system of proximity (space) unique to the world of humanity (anthropological), and thus dependent on human technologies, significations, culture, conventions, representations and emotions. [5]
*Four anthropological spaces: earth, territorial space, commodity space, knowledge space.
*Earth: homo sapiens: The first item on our resumé is generally our name, our symbolic inscription within an ancestral line. [6]
*Territorial space: Agriculture, city, state, writing: Today, along with our name, we have an address, which serves to identify ourselves within the territory of residents and taxpayers. [6]
*Commodity space had a deterritorializing effect.
*The commodity space did not eliminate the preceding spaces, it outpaced them. [7]
*On our resumé, right after our name (position on earth) and our address (position within the territory), we generally indicate our profession (position in the commodity space). [8]
*The knowledge space will control preceding spaces, rather than eliminate them. [8]
*Our living knowledge, skills and abilities are in the process of being recognized as the primary source of all other wealth. [9]
*Internetworked data would then provide the technical infrastructure for the collective brain or hypercortex. [9]
====The Social Bond and Its Relationship to Knowledge [10]====
*Collective intelligence, as the term is used in this book, is a global project whose ethical and aesthetic dimensions are as important as its technological and organizational aspects. [10]
*This vision of the future is organized around two complementary axes: the renewal of the social bonds through our relation to knowledge and collective intelligence itself. [11]
*By establishing the social bond on the basis of our relationship to knowledge, we will encourage growth of a deterritorialized civility that coincides with contemporary sources of power while incorporating the most intimate forms of subjectivity. [11]
*Knowledge trees enable us to encounter the other as a bundle of knowledge, within the knowledge space and no longer as name, address, profession or social status. [12]
====What is Collective Intelligence? [13]====
*Collective intelligence is a form of universal distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. [13]
*The basis and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostasized communities. [13]
*Intelligence is constantly enhanced. [14] {Engelbart: Constantly better in getting better.}
*Intelligence is coordinated in real time. [14]
*Skills are effectively mobilized. [15]
*Collective intelligence must not be confused with totalitarian projects involving the subordination of individuals to transcendent and fetishistic communities. [16]
*In an ant colony, the individuals are dumb; they have no collective vision and no awareness of how their actions are integrated with those of other individuals. But although individual ants might be stupid, their action results in an emergent behavior that is globally intelligent. [16]
*The ant colony is the opposite of collective intelligence in the sense that I am using the expression. Far from leading us in the direction of the knowledge space, the ant colony precedes the earth. Any attempt to assimilate the operation of society to that of an ant colony should be considered barbarous and reprehensible. [16]
*Through processes of transmission, invention, or forgetfulness, heritage becomes an element of individual responsibility. [17]
*Individual acts are coordinated and evaluated in real time, according to a large number of criteria that are themselves constantly re-evaluated in context. [17]
*We pass from the Cartesian cogito to cogitamus. [17]

==Engineering the Social Bond [21]==

===The Just: The ethics of Collective Intelligence [23]===
*If our human world has lasted until the present, it is because the just are still with us, because the traditions of hospitality, assistance, openness, care, recognition, and constructiveness are, in the end, more common or stronger than exclusion, indifference, negligence, resentment, and destruction. [25] {Bill Joy: the world doesn't need us}
*Sodom and Gomorra: But not all cities were destroyed, ad our presence on earth proves that, until now and throughout the world, the "quantity of good" has exceeded the "quantity of evil". [25] {Joy}
*Evil is everywhere and always visible, while the good (activity of the just) can only be discovered after a detailed, on-the-spot investigation (the angels visit Sodom), or by its indirect effects, the culmination of a painstaking process of reasoning. [25] {these pages have an excellent explanation of the barter between God and Abraham about Sodom and Gomorra.}
*Hospitality is the act of attaching the individual to a community. In every respect, it is the opposite of exclusion. [26]
*Why didn't Lot succeed in saving Sodom? Because collective force is required to sustain a community. [27]
*The just are efficient; they are able to maintain the existence of a community, only when they form a collective intelligence. [27]
*If the just are able to prevent destruction, it is because the good is closely associated with being, and more importantly, the capacity for being, or strength. And perhaps it is still more closely associated with the increase of strength. [28]
*If strength is good, power is bad, for it is measured by its capacity to limit strength, by its potential for destruction. [28]
*Power creates fear. [28]
*Power is boisterous; it prevents the community from communicating with itself. [28]
*Power comes into being and sustains itself only by impoverishing the qualities of being around it. [28]
*The just avoid power. [28]
*Abraham invented the process of engineering the social bond. [29]

===Human Qualities: The Economy of Collective Intelligence. [31]===
*The economy will center, as it does already, on that which can never be fully automated, on that which is irreducible: the production of the social bond, the relational. [31]
*This implies not only an economy of knowledge, but a more general, human economy, one that comprises the economy of knowledge as one of its subsystems. [31]
*When global relations and social interactions create a situation in which competition is based on common interest, then competition shifts to the domain of ethics. [32]
*We are forced to conclude that scarcity is socially manufactured, that poverty and exclusion are organized, even if they are not intentionally promoted. [33]
*In the economy of the future, capital will be the total individual. [34]
*Those who manufacture things will become scarcer and scarcer. [34]
*Information processing skills will no longer be needed. [34]
*The final frontier will be the human itself, that which can't be automated: the creation of sensible worlds, invention, relation, the continuous recreation of the community. [35]

===From the Molar to the Molecular: The Technology of Collective Intelligence [39]===
*Table: The Major Technological Evolutions [41]
====Life [42]====
*Natural selection could be considered a technology that life applies to itself. On the human level its effects take place with infinite slowness. [42] {Guszti Eiben: multisexual reproduction can speed it up considerably.}
*Artificial selection represents the next most important biological technology. Using he same basic processes as natural selection, it innovates by finalizing and accelerating the formation of species. [43]
*The creation of a species depended on geological (natural selection is measured in thousand-year units), hen historical (artificial selection takes place in several generations) time periods, and is now beginning to take place in real time, immediately (biotechnology is measured in terms of man-months, hardware and dollars). [43]
*The slogan of contemporary biotechnology could be: gene by gene, molecule by molecule. [43]
====Matter [43]====
====Information [45]====
====Human Communities [50]====
*In learning to control life, we tend toward finely granulated modes of action, those that are targeted, precise, rapid, economic, qualitative, discrete, calculated and carefully implemented at a specific moment in time, while closely following the continuous evolution of goals and situations. [50]
*Families, clans, and tribes are organic groups. Nations institutions, religions, large corporations, as well as revolutionary "masses" are organized groups, molar groups, which undergo a process of transcendence or exteriority in forming and maintaining themselves. [51]
*Finally, self-organized, or molecular groups realize the ideal of direct democracy within very large communities in the process of mutation and deterritorialization. [51]
*No organic group can exist unless each of its members knows the names of the others. [52]
*Within a collectivity of this type, individuals obey rules, follow traditions, and respect codes. [52]
*In systems organized around molecular politics, groups [] attempt to enhance their individual qualities indefinitely. [53]
*Able to reorganize itself in real time, minimizing delays, deadlines, and friction, the molecular group evolves at room temperature, without sudden change. [53]
*It [the politics] makes use of every human act, enhances individual qualities. [53]
*Rather it brings into being an immanent social bond, one that emerges through one-to-many relations. [54]
*The multiplication of molecular communities assumes the relative decline of media-based communication that is receptive to collective intelligence, a space that becomes increasingly navigable and accessible as molecular technologies become operational and available at low cost. [54]
*Real-time, large-scale collective intelligence thus requires a sufficient technical infrastructure. [54]
*Within the human sphere, molecular technologies provide groups and the individual with the instruments for selectively enhancing themselves, quality by quality. [54]
*Such technologies promote mutual recognition and synergy among anthropic qualities. [54]
*The members of a molecular community communicate laterally, reciprocally, outside categories and hierarchies, folding and refolding, weaving and reweaving, complicating the great metamorphic fabric of their peaceful cities. [55] {fluidiom}

===The Dynamics of Intelligent Cities: A Manifesto for Molecular Politics [57]===
*My approach is a utopian one, based on a form of direct, computer-mediated democracy--a virtual agora--that is more appropriate than current representative systems in helping us cross the turbulent waters of anthropological mutation. [57]
====Technology and Politics [58]====
*It is essential that we begin to imagine, experiment with, and actively promote, within this new communications space, organizational structures and decision-making styles that are oriented toward a deepening of our sense of democracy. [59]
====Inadequacy of Government Structures [59]====
*The cooperative parallel processing of problems will require the design of intelligent tools for filtering data, navigating within the information stream, and simulating complex systems; tools for lateral communication; and the mutual recognition of individuals and groups on the basis of their activities and skills. [61]
*It is likely that some of the emerging technologies for the interactive construction and visualization of the spaces of signification will enable us to move in this direction. [61] {fluidiom}
====Will the Virtual Agora be Limited to an Elite? [61]====
*It is not unreasonable to assume that in a few years' time the majority of households could also be equipped with terminals (cybergates) that are part of a communications system designed around a many-to-many spatial configuration. [63]
*Cooperative cyberspace must be designed as a form of public service. [63]
====Representative and Direct Democracy [63]====
====The formation of a Collective Voice [66]====
*Collectivity is not necessarily synonymous with solidity and uniformity. [66]
*Certain forms of organization enable individuals to differentially participate in a final, complex utterance: Books or articles can be written by several authors; film credits can include everyone's contribution to the production, so can plays, newspapers, etc. [67]
*To be completely free, however, the voice of the community should hang on its breath; it should flow ceaselessly and renew itself in real time. [67]
*For individuals, this [real time democracy] is especially difficult because each of them is at the same time called upon to (1) listen to the other members of the chorus, (2) sing slightly out of register, and (3) find a point of harmonious coexistence between his own voice and that of the others, that is, improve the overall effect of the ensemble. [67]
*Singers must therefore resist three "harmful attractors": the desire the voice of their neighbors by singing too loudly, the urge to remain silent, and the tendency to sing in unison. [68]
*This mediation could be immanent rather than transcendent. [68]
====Dynamic of the Intelligent City [69]====
*From a political perspective, the major phases in the dynamic of collective intelligence are listening, expression, decision-making, evaluation, organization, connection, and vision, all of which are interrelated. [70]
*The term "listening" is preferable to communication because it evokes emptiness of a vacuum rather than the fullness of a channel. [71]
*Listening reverses the direction of the media. [71]
*Real time democracy maximizes the responsibility of the citizen called upon to make decisions, accept the consequences of those decisions, and make judgments on the basis of those decisions. [73]
*Organization follows from the actions that precede it. [73]
*The assignment of responsibilities and resources, it is to be efficient, that is, capable of stimulating processes rather than simply strengthening territorial space, must of necessity be part of a continuous cycle of listening, expression, decision-making, and evaluation. [73]
*A basic phase in the cycle of collective intelligence, the organization becomes a self-organization, or rather, it appears as the organizing moment of a more universal self-organization. [74]
*In the context of the intelligent city, organization cannot be conceived without its disorganizing complement: the lateral connection. [74]
*Vision […] should rather be seen as an act of seeing, the flowering of a collective vision, a vision of the self in the process of becoming. [75]
*This vision is the product of our previous acts: listening, expression decision, evaluation, organization, connection. [75]
*This vision does not come from above; it is not the act of an organ distinct from collective intelligence. [75]
*It [this vision] emerges from interactions and contacts, circulation, encounters. [75]
*Appropriately distributed, global vision is reflected and diffracted in individual projects and strategies, orients and polarizes molecular processes. [76]
*Vision is the emerging and global aspect of listening. [76]
====Real-time democracy [76]====
*In contrast, real time democracy initiates a period of decision-making and continuous evaluation, during which a responsible community knows that it will eventually be confronted with the results of its current decisions. [80]
*Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior. Panic, collective enthusiasm, etc. are the result of the epidemic propagation of emotion and representation among masses of isolated individuals. [81]
====Totalitarism and the Economy of Human Qualities [82]====
*Doesn't this real time democracy mask a new form of totalitarism? … Big brother is watching you?
*But real time democracy is organized not around the vision of power over a society (totalitarism), not around the spectacle of power (the media), but the communication of the community with itself, knowledge of the community's self. [82]
====Power and strength [87]====
*Strength makes things possible; power serves to hinder. [87]
*Strength can liberate, power subordinates. [87]
*Strength accumulates energy; power squanders it. [87]
*Power results in loss. [89]
*A shift has occurred, therefore, from democracy (from the Greek démos, people, and cratein, to command) to a state of demodynamics (Greek dunamis force, strength). [88] It comes into being from the cycle of listening, expression, evaluation, organization, lateral connection, and emerging vision. It encourages real time regulation, continuous cooperative apprenticeship, optimal enhancement of human qualities and the exaltation of singularity. [88]
*Demodynamics does not imply a sovereign people, one that is reified, fetishized, attached to a territory, identified by soil or blood, but a strong people, one perpetually engaged in the process of self-knowing and self-creation, a people in labor, a people yet to come. [89]

===Choreography of Angelic Bodies: The Atheology of Collective Intelligence [91]===
*…introducing some medieval theological notions of collective intelligence and imagination. [91]
====The Farbian Tradition [92]====
*This "collective consciousness" was referred to as the agent intellect by these Aristotelian mystics because it was an ever active intelligence, one that constantly contemplated true ideas and enabled human intelligences to become active (and therefore effective) by directing toward them all the ideas that it perceived or contemplated. [92]
*This shared intellect links men to God, a God who is fundamentally conceived as self-reflexive thought, a knowing divinity and form of knowledge rather than an all-powerful deity, a pure intelligence for whom creativity is only an afterthought. [92]
*Following Aristotle, Farbian theology was less concerned with the power or strength of God than with His enigmatic manner of thinking, His eternal self-contemplation. [93]
*God is not infinitely more than we are (more powerful, wiser, more just, etc.), but radically different: an absolute unit of thought engaged in self-reflective thinking. [94]
====The Agent Intellect [94]====
*In the theology of Al-F√£r√£bî and Avicenna, God does not create the world through some special act of will, there is no "coup d'état within eternity" but a series of necessary and eternal consequences of the act of self-reflective divine thought. [94]
*The world emanates from God as an afterthought because of the overabundance of His intelligence, according to an immaterial causality that the neo-Platonic philosophers referred to as procession or emanation. [94]
*Through God's contemplation of His own thought emanates the First Separate Intelligence, or First Cherub. [94]
*It is referred to as a separate Intelligence to emphasize the fact that is "pure" and not attached to any physical entity. [94]
*This First Separate Intelligence is engaged in three distinct forms of contemplation from which three consequences follow. [94]
*First, it contemplates the principle that is the cause of its necessary existence, which is God. Through this First Intelligence's contemplation of God's thought, a Second Separate Intelligence emanates. [94]
*Second, the First Intelligence contemplates itself as a necessary emanation of God. From this contemplation arises the soul that drives the First Heaven. [94]
*Third, the First Intelligence contemplates the possibility of its existence in itself, independent of the principle from which it emanates. From this third contemplation, which is the darkest, the lowest, the body of the First Heaven emanates. [94]
*In its turn the Second Intelligence, or Second Cherub, (1) contemplates its principle, which is the First Intelligence; (2) contemplates itself as emanation from the First Intelligence; and (3) contemplates itself independent of its principle. [95]
*From these contemplations arise (1) the Third Intelligence; (2) the soul that drives the Second Heaven; and (3) the ethereal body of the Second Heaven. [95]
*This process continues through the Tenth Separate Intelligence. [95]
*The motive souls, or celestial angels, are characterized by imagination, a pure imagination independent of the senses, which enables them to represent themselves and desire the Intelligence from which they proceed. [95]
*The love of the celestial angels sets the heavens in motion (from which the expression motive soul), a motion that is eternal since these souls never achieve the Intelligences they desire. [95]
*Thee divine influx, from which the cherubim, angels, and heavens arise, ends by exhausting itself. [95]
*The process of emanation culminates with the Tenth Separate Intelligence, or agent intellect. [95]
*This agent intellect is also referred to as "the Angel". [95]
*When used without any other modifier, the definite article indicates the angel of knowledge and revelation, the angel who intercedes directly with humanity. [95]
*Through the Angle's contemplation of itself, independent of its principle, emanates not the rarefied body of a heaven but the distribution, explosion, and opacity of sub lunar matter, the coarse substance of our base world. [95]
*Through the Angel's contemplation of itself as a product of the Ninth Intelligence emanates not the motive soul of a sphere, a celestial angel, but the multitude of human souls whose thick sensual imagination moves the material bodies. [95]
*Finally, the most eminent form of thought accessible to the Tenth Separate Intelligence is obviously the contemplation of its principle (the Ninth Intelligence). [96]
*From this contemplation emanate all the forms of terrestrial bodies as well as the ideas of forms of knowledge present in those human souls disposed to receive them. [96]
*The agent intellect is the irradiating source of all the forms and ideas of the sub lunar world we inhabit. [96]
*Humans are always potential intelligences but they can only act (that is, following Aristotelian terminology, become truly intelligent and knowing) when they are illuminated by the Angel. [96]
*Intelligible forms stream from the agent intellect, and when they reach suitably receptive souls, they enable the transition from potential (possible) to active knowledge (real). [96]
*We are thus actively intelligent only because of the agent intellect, shared by all humanity, which is a kind of "collective consciousness". [96]
*For mankind, the greatest happiness is obviously its unity with the agent intellect, the ability to fully and completely capture the angelic emission. [96]
*But the process of emanation doesn't end here. The divine influx is received by our rational faculty with varying degrees of intensity. [96]
*Some individuals receive a superabundance of ideas from the agent intellect. [96]
*Ideas percolate through their rational faculty toward their spiritual imagination, and they redistribute what they have received by prophesying to other men and women. [96]
*It is from this prophetic source that knowledge continues to expand "horizontally", from human soul to human soul, until the initial influx is exhausted. [96]
*Those who lack the gift of prophecy but yet receive the illumination of forms with sufficient strength become teachers, writers, and legislators, by power of reason alone, transmitting in their turn, from one to another, this knowledge of divine origin. [96]
*Like the prophet, they serve as retransmitters. [96]
*Others do not receive ideas from the agent intellect with sufficient force to distribute their knowledge, but have enough for their individual perfection. [96]
*Yet others, like a television whose antenna is poorly oriented, have arranged their soul in such a manner that the Angel only illuminates them at rare intervals, if at all, and although all humans are potentially intelligent, some are incapable of making this intelligence active. [97]
====From Angelic to Virtual Worlds [97]====
*Redefined from a human perspective, the angelic regions open the communications space of communities to themselves without the intervention of the divinity, or any form of transcendent representation for that matter (revealed law, authority, or other a priori forms imposed from above). [97]
*Virtual worlds will be instruments of self-knowledge and self-definition for humanity, which can then form itself into autonomous and autopoietic collective intellects. [98]
*In place of the ubiquitous agoras and cosmic simulations, these immanent heavens provide cinemaps, dynamic descriptions of the world below, moving images of the events and situations into which human communities are plunged. [98] {fluidiom}
*They are home to the "angelic bodies" (or virtual images) of the members of collective intellects--whether individuals or groups--impelling them toward self-awareness and mutual contact. [98]
*Synthesizing the complexity and transformations of the terrestrial world, virtual worlds enable intelligences to communicate with one another and assist individuals and groups navigating collective knowledge. [98]
*Through these virtual worlds, the world below will continue to proliferate, mutate, and open new pathways of individualization that will, in turn, nurture the "angelic space". [98]
*The greater the number pf collective intellects with which an individual is involved, the more opportunities he has to diversify his knowledge and desire. [99]
*Moreover, he is enabled to enrich with his living variety the thinking communities he helps to construct. [99]
*In each virtual world we traverse, we will clothe different angelic body. [99]
*Rather than directing upon mankind the intellectual light that descends from God via the heavens and superior angels, the virtual world that serves as agent intellect reflects the light that emanates from human communities. [99]
====Enigma and Desire [100]====
*In the context of theological discourse illumination comes from above, and the Angel's, or God's, representative distributes it among mankind. [100]
*According to our humanist version, the individual who is most capable of accepting the lower world that surrounds him and receiving the teachings (most often and unconscious) of the richness and diversity he has finally mastered. [100]
*Theology outlined a unidirectional pattern of distribution, one that descends from above before spreading outward with centrifugal force. [101]
*Anthropology embodies a form of centripetal circulation that rises from below and showers us with a rain that, even as it falls, anticipates future ascensions of newly concentrated knowledge. [101]
*With the space that emanates from the collective intelligence, I thus encounter the human other, no longer as flesh and blood, as social rank, an owner of things, but as an angel, an active intelligence--active for himself but potential for me. [102]
*Should he ever agree to expose his face of light, when I discover the angelic body of the other, I will contemplate his life in knowledge or his knowledge of life, the projection of his subjective world upon the immanent heaven of the collective intellect. [102]
*Because I do not know what he knows, because our becomings differ, he is, within this space, a unique, incomparable figure of desire: His angelic body reveals this to me as enigma and alterity. [102]
*It is in this way that the other world, or mystery, of theology becomes the world of the other, or enigma, of anthropology. [103]
*Among the medieval philosophers love rose from the soul toward the superior intelligences. [103]
*In our humanist system it is by their passage through virtual worlds, by acquiring an angelic body, that souls can best imagine humanity, from which perhaps follows, along with the desire of learning, he growth of friendship among men. [103]
*When referring to those who cease learning, we no longer speak of ignorance but of closure, a delayed life, a rigidity that is impermeable to the proliferation of strength, a refusal to encounter the other as angel, a fear of enigma and desire. [103]
====The Problem of Evil [103]====
*Obscurity and matter, or evil, occur because intelligences contemplate themselves as existing independently of the superior principle from which they emanate. [103]
*Men forget to turn toward the agent intellect, the separate intelligence neglects the superior intelligences, the First Separate Intelligence contemplates itself without God. [103]
*What is the cause of evil from the present humanist perspective?
*Collective intellects may be tempted to consider virtual worlds as realities in themselves, forgetting the living human beings from which they arise and of which the are merely the expression. [103] {team}
*This is their dark side. [103]
*Any illusionary autonomization of the figure of the community, any idolatrous fixation on its countenance, ant transcendent becoming of the knowledge space will give rise to evil. [103]
*In such a case, the question of truth is substituted for the uninterrupted dynamic of learning and exploration. [103]
*Mystery and terror replace enigma and desire. [103]
*Exclusion succeeds mutual recognition. [103]
*And ultimately, forgetfulness of the living and present origin of virtual worlds, their reification, their separation from the innumerable human sources from which they originate will inevitably introduce the obsessive problem of power within a space where it does not belong. [104]
*We can the pose the following absurd question: Who will control such virtual worlds? This is like asking who will speak in the name of the community within these virtual worlds, when such worlds are precisely the very means of self-organization, self-definition, and autonomous self-construction of the community within the knowledge space. [104]
*Any assumption of control by a small splinter group, any petrification of living, collective expression, any evolution toward transcendence immediately annihilates the angelic nature of a virtual word, which falls at once into the obscure regions of domination, power, belonging and exclusion. [104]
*I am aware that many claim that self-organization is impossible; they cannot conceive of a space in which the question of power does not arise, they consider knowledge a territory to be divided up or a network to be controlled. [104]
*I can only encourage them to continue their explorations in an attempt to enlarge their subjective world. [104]
*The angels of the living unite to perpetually form and re-form the Angel of the collective, the moving of the radiant body of human knowledge. [104]
*The Angel does not speak. [104]
*It is itself the aggregate voice or choral chant that rises from an acting and thinking humanity. [104]
====The Intellect, the Intelligible, the Intelligent [104]====
*This implies a relationship to knowledge that will differ from that which exists today, the inauguration of an unmediated communications space, a profound renewal of human relations, both within the context of work and within political life, a reinvention of democracy--all possibilities that are embodied in the ideal of the collective intellect. [105] {fluidiom}
*The collective intellect is a kind of corporation in which each shareholder supplies as capital his knowledge, experience, and his ability to learn and teach. [105]
*The intelligent collective neither submits to nor limits individual intelligences, but on the contrary exalts them, fructifies and reinvigorates them. [105]
*This transpersonal subject is not merely the sum of individual intelligences. [105]
*Rather, it gives rise to a qualitatively different form of intelligence, which is added to personal intelligences, forming a kind of collective brain, or hypercortex. [105] {fluidiom}
*As we have seen, according to medieval philosophy, man's intelligence only becomes active intermittently [106]
*God, however, is eternally active thought because He always realizes, outside time, the perfect unity of the intellect, the intelligible, and intellection. [106]
*To better understand the difference between divine and human thought, we will first distinguish the three terms: the intelligible, the intellect, and intellection. [106]
*That which is intelligible are the forms or ideas of things. [106]
*But to the extent that they inform things, ideas are only potential. [106]
*They do not become active, or fully become ideas, until they are perceived by an intellect. [106]
*The intellect is the ability to comprehend or perceive ideas, a characteristic of intelligent beings. [106]
*As long as it perceives forms, the intellect remains a potential. [106]
*It only becomes active when it identifies with the ideas that it embraces, by becoming one with them. [106]
*Intellection is the becoming-idea of the intellect, the movement that realizes the union of the intellect and the intelligible. [106]
*It is through intellection that the intelligent being passes from potentiality to act, and thus reunites with its essence. [106]
*In accomplishing this act the intelligent being is united with his intellect and thus, at the same time, with the intelligible form comprised by the intellect. [106]
*Each time there is an active thought, the intellect, the intelligent, and the intelligible become one and the same. [106]
*Why is man not always actively intelligent and thus united to his essence? Because mankind's intellect is not in a continual state of operation: It sleeps, dreams, grows tired, sick, etc. [106]
*It is necessary the he proceed successively from the intellection of one idea to that of another. [107]
*This inevitably results in discontinuities, breaks, which are exacerbated to the external world. [107]
*At the moment when our intellect leaps from one perception to another, intellection is interrupted and separated from its own essence. [107]
*God alone can contemplate a single idea since that idea is the source of all the others. [107]
*This occurs without any sense of discontinuity because He is that idea. [107]
*Being incorporeal, God never sleeps, never tires, is never immersed in sensation or passion. [107]
*As pure idea from which all ideas emanate, He contemplates himself through the motionless movement of endless intellection. [107]
*He contemplates himself through the motionless movement of endless intellection. [107]
*His essence is to be eternally intellect, intelligible, and intelligent. [107]
*While the thought of individuals is discontinuous because they sleep, grow ill, tired, or take vacations, the collective intellect is always alert. [107]
*When a mind slips into sleep, a hundred others rise up to take its place. [107]
*Consequently, the virtual world is always illuminated, animated by the flames of living intelligences. [107]
*By combining thousands of intermittent flickering rays, we obtain a collective light that shines continuously. [107]
*I could be wrong to compare this process to some simple mental "changing of the guard", a summation of consciousnesses. [107]
*No, this is the expression of a collective intelligence. [107]
*For when I sleep, my angel continues to act in the virtual world. [107]
*My angel. [107]
*This is the expression I wish to give to y memory, my knowledge, y navigations, my desire to learn, my hierarchy of interests, the relationships I have with the other members of the thinking community. [107]
*This angel, my digital messenger, helps inform, orient, and continuously evaluate the virtual world, which is itself the expression of all messengers. [108] {gossip}
*These landscapes will be mapped and divided into interactive spaces by new sign systems, dynamic diagrams and ideograms, moving architectures of images. [108] {fluidiom}
*Computer hardware and software will make these universes of signification sensible, explorable, and interactive. [108] {fluidiom}
*Collective intelligence realizes its reintegration. [108]
*It constructs transpersonal but continuous thought. [108] {fluidiom} {gossip}
*An anonymous cogitation but one that is perpetually alive, uniformly irrigated, metamorphic. [108] {fluidiom}
*Through the intermediary of virtual worlds, we can not only exchange information but think together, share our memories and our plans to produce a cooperative brain. [108] {fluidiom}
*Media continuity is merely physical. [109]
*It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for intellectual continuity. [109]
====The Sensible and the Intelligible [109]====
*Translation from one language or discipline to another, enables disconnected thought spaces to communicate with one another. [109]
*But conventional writing is by nature a system of static and discontinuous traces. [109]
*It is an inert body, fragmented, dispersed, ever growing, whose consolidation and animation require of each individual a lengthy process of research, interpretation, and association. [109]
*To remedy this situation, the virtual worlds of collective intelligence will develop new forms of writing: animated pictograms, cinelanguages that will retain the trace of interactions of their navigators. [109]
*Collective memory will organize and redeploy itself for each navigator on the basis of his interests and travels in the virtual world. [109] {fluidiom}
*The new, angelic space of signs will be sensible, active, intelligent, and at the service of explorers. [109] {fluidiom}
*What is interpretation? [109]
*The subtle mind attempting to coax the inert body of the letter into graceful motion. [109]
*The evocation of an author's breath in the presence of dead signs. [109]
*The dangerous reconstruction of the know of affects and images from which the text arises. [109]
*But if the signs are alive? [110]
*If the text-image or thought-space grows, proliferates, and metamorphoses continuously, following the rhythm of the collective intelligence? [110] {fluidiom}
*If the lead characters make room for the very substance of the angels. [110]
*If the opaque and gigantic satisfaction of texts effaces itself before a fluid and continuous medium whose explorer always occupies the center. [110] {seems to me this is the essence or definition of fluidiom}
*As we have shown, every thought, even the most abstract, is based to some extent on the presence of an image. [110]
*Of course, the image is not used exclusively to improve understanding; it fascinates, seduces, and deceives as well. [110]
*It is as if the sensible were the prize in confused and inconclusive struggle: instrument of knowledge, playing field for the intelligence, or black hole of the mind? [110]
*The more the intelligible is understood in terms of the sensible, the more the sign-image increases in scope and complexity, and the shorter becomes the distance between man and God. [111]
*Stimulating the human mind, the new agent intellect is defined as a machine to make thought visible, to image abstraction and complexity, creating a landscape that our angelic bodies can explore, feel, and modify. [111] {fluidiom}
*The virtual world makes interconnected relation apparent, enables us to touch the most obscure notions; it illuminates images, makes them comprehensible. [111] {fluidiom}
*It is the most appropriate environment for the flowering and development of the visual11 languages that will weave together the intelligence, or, rather, the collective imagination. [111] {fluidiom}
*Within the theological framework man receives his ideas from the outside, whereas God contemplates Himself. [111]
*It is true that on a human scale, intelligence is the gateway to what is external, perpetual unfulfillment, an effort to reach the outside and that which is not self. [111]
*When we learn, we enter the world of the other. [111] {just like in fluidiom meme spaces can fly through each other}
*But while learning, that is, while transforming himself, the thinking subject strives continuously to bring the stranger to him, to transform the other into self, so that foreignness can no longer be grasped in itself and we must again clear a path to the outside. [111]
*It is at the same time a society of animated signs, a shared organ of perception, cooperative memory, and space for communication and navigation. [112]
*Just as writing or the telephone did not prevent people from continuing to meet in person, the virtual worlds of collective intellect cannot substitute for direct human contact. [111] {human contact is (still) the only way to perceive genuine human emotions (or body language); also see How the mind works, from Steven Pinker}
====The Three Freedoms [113]====
*We know that God is his own cause. But what is a cause? [113]
*According to Aristotelian philosophy, there are four types of cause: if, for example, we take a vase made by a potter, the clay is its material cause, the potter its efficient cause, the shape initially conceived by the potter its formal cause, and the property of containing liquid its final cause. [113]
*God obviously has no material cause. [113]
*As for the rest, God is final, efficient, and formal cause in and of Himself, which is why he is absolutely free. [113]
*A human being unfortunately does not have this possibility: His parents are his efficient cause, God (or other biological evolution) his formal cause, and he can't always become and end for himself. [113]
*But since naked and solitary man is unable to do so, why not attempt to form collective intellects capable of achieving such divine freedom? [113] {tower of Babel?}
*The collective intellect is its own final cause. [113]
*It has no goal other than to grow, develop, differentiate itself, and propagate the varieties of signs that populate it, the cosmic diversity that it envelops, and the ontological plurality that is its richness and its life. [113]
*To do so, it must obviously maintain its existence and thus respect certain economic, technical, and other constraints. [113]
*The collective intellect is as much as possible its own efficient cause. [113]
*It is born from the will of its members and not from some outside impulse. [113]
*In a sense, therefore, it must already exist before it can come into being (since it is composed of "its members"). [114]
*This paradox of creative circularity is inherent in all automatic or autopoietic production. [114]
*The ability of the collective intellect to become its own formal cause is its greatest achievement, the touchstone of its immanence. [114]
*I would even say that its final cause is its own existence, that is, its existence as self-cause, in the sense that we have just defined. [114]
*But if its members succeed in maintaining the autonomy of the collective intellect, each increase in qualitative diversity strengthens the interest of everyone in its continued existence. [115] {team}
*And the more its members are involved in its permanent re-creation, the more the immanent dynamic of expression will favor the proliferation of ways of being. [115] {increasing returns}
*Each mode of freedom will be reflected upon the others in a positive spiral. [115] {increasing returns}
*In this way collective intellect creates a new space. [115]

===The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace: The Aesthetics of Collective Intelligence [117]===
====Cyberspace Under Construction [117]====
*These [knowledge navigators] would include, in no particular order: hypertext, the World Wide Web…neuro-mimetic programs, artificial life, expert systems, etc. [118]
*While the true "great works" remain to be accomplished within the universe of the digital information and the new sites for the emergence of collective intelligence, we continue to encumber the landscape with cement, glass and steel. [119]
*We have built pyramids when we are in the process of again becoming nomads, when architecture for a new exodus is needed. [119] {fluidiom}
*Cyberspace: urban nomad, software engineering, the liquid architecture of the knowledge space. [119] {fluidiom}
*It brings with it methods of collective perception, feeling, remembrance, working, playing and being. [119] {fluidiom}
*It is an interior architecture, an unfinished system of intelligence hardware, a gyrating city with its rooftops of signs. [119]
*The development of cyberspace, the quintessential medium of communication and thought, is one of the principal aesthetic and political challenges of the coming century. [119]
====From Design to Implementation [121]====
*With respect to its relationship to future projects, cyberspace will assume the form of cultural attractor, which we can summarize as follows.
*1. …messages will now revolve around the individual receiver. [121]
*2. The distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend to form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from machine and network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activity of the others (dissolution of the signature). [121]
*3. The distinction between the message and the work of art, envisaged as a microterritory attributed to an author is fading. [121]
*Rather than distribute a message to recipients who are outside the process of creation and invited to give meaning to a work of art belatedly, the artist now attempts to construct an environment a system of communication and production, a collective event that implies its recipients, transforms interpreters into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop with collective action. [123] {fluidiom}
*Clearly the "open work" prefigures such an arrangement. [123]
*But the art of implication doesn't constitute a work of art at all, even one that is open or indefinite. [123]
*It brings forth a process, attempts to open a career to autonomous lives, provides an introduction to the growth and habitation of a world. [123]
*It places us within a creative cycle, a living environment of which we are already the coauthors. [123]
*The accent has now shifted from work to progress. [123]
*Its embodiment is manifested in moments, places, collective dynamic, but no longer in individuals. [123]
*It is an art without signature. [123]
*Each of us in our own way, as soon as we express ourselves, produces, reproduces, and alters language. [123]
*From singular utterances to creative listening, languages emerge and drift along the stream of communication, borne by thousands of voices that call and respond to one another, take risks, provoke and deceive, hurling words, expressions and new accents across the abyss of non-sense. [124]
*In this way and artist can appropriate an expression inherited from earlier generations and help it evolve. [124]
*This is one of the primary social functions of art: participation in the continuous invention of the languages and signs of a community. [124]
*But the creator of language is always a community. [124]
====For an Architecture of Deterritorialization [126]====
*The artists who explore such alternatives may be the pathfinders of new architecture of cyberspace, which will undoubtedly become one of the major arts of the twenty-first century. [126] {fluidiom}
*The new architects could just as easily be engineers, network or interface designers, software programmers, international standards organizations, information lawyers, etc., as individuals with a traditional form of art. [126] {fluidiom}
*In this field, the most obviously "technical" choices will have considerable political, economic, and cultural impact. [126]
*To guide the construction of cyberspace, to help us choose among the different possible orientations or even imagine new ones, some criteria of ethical and political selection are needed, an organizing vision. [126]
*Means that contribute to the production of a collective intelligence or imagination should be encouraged. [126]
*In keeping with this general principal, I would suggest that we concentrate on the following: [126]
*1. Instruments that promote the development of the social bond through apprenticeship and the exchange of knowledge. [127]
*2. Methods of communication that are predisposed to acknowledge, integrate, and restore diversity rather than simply reproduce traditional media-driven forms of distribution. [127]
*3. Systems that promote the emergence of autonomous beings, regardless of the nature of the systems (pedagogical, artistic, etc.) or the beings involved (individuals, groups, works of art, artificial creatures). [127]
*4. Semiotic engineering that will enable us to exploit and enhance, for the benefit of the greatest number, the veins of data, the capital of skills, and symbolic power accumulated by humanity. [127]
*technicians have a great deal to learn from humanists in this area. [127]

==The Knowledge Space [128]==

===The Four Spaces===
====The Earth [131]====
*The earth is not a planet, not even a biosphere, but a cosmos in which humanity communicates with animals, plants, landscapes, locales and spirits.
*The earth is the spaces in which mankind, the stones, vegetables, beasts, and gods meet, talk, come together, and separate in a process of unending re-creation. [132]
*Mankind does not live within a niche, as a dog does, because it can gaze at the stars, invent the gods that fashioned it, adopt eagles and leopards as its ancestors, and live among its signs, its tales, and its deeds. [132]
*Man is the only animal that lives in the cosmos that does not simply belong to a species but chooses its totems. [132]
*Humanity is the species dedicated to the earth, to the cosmos of animals and plants in communication, to the chaosmos of metamorphoses. [132]
====Territory [133]====
*For the past twelve thousand years, a second anthropological space, the territorial space, has been spreading across the earth in ever expanding sheets, isolated patches that have slowly come together over the centuries. [133]
*With the earth, the territory establishes a predatory and destructive relationship; it dominates, confines, encloses, inscribes, and measures it. [134]
====The Commodity Space [135]====
*Or did the commodity space come into being in the eighteenth century, amid the smoke of the industrial revolutions? [135]
*This was not the customary space of exchange or commerce, but a new world built from the incessant circulation of money in an ever tightening, ever quickening loop. [135]
*But in the wake of an extraordinary historical conjunction, a collective revery or desire that was already beginning to escape territorial sp ace, in search of another space, other velocities. [135]
*This new world succeeded in enlarging itself, living off its own life. [136]
*Crossing borders, upsetting territorial hierarchies, the dance of money brought its wake an accelerated movement, a rising tides of objects, signs, and individuals. [136]
*The commodity space was smoothed out, maintained, and enlarged by a deterritorializing machine, which suddenly sprang into being, feeding on everything in its path. [136]
*Just as King Midas transformed whatever he touched into gold, capitalism transmutes into merchandise everything it draws into its orbit. [136]
*When the commodity space assumes its autonomy within the territory, it doesn't simply abolish the preceding spaces, but subordinates them, organizes them in terms of its own objectives. [137]
*Capitalism is deterritorializing and, for the past three centuries, industry and commerce have been the principal engines driving the evolution of human societies. [137]
*Capitalism is irreversible. [137]
*It is economy and has made economy the permanent dimension of human existence. [137]
*There will always be a commodity space, as there will always be an earth and territorial space. [137]
*Weaving back and forth in its dizzying ascension, the mantle of commodity, the sky of contemporary humanity, tears open to reveal another space. [138]
====The Knowledge Space [138]====
*The knowledge space doesn't exist. [138]
*Etymologically, it is a u-topia, no-place. [138]
*It is embodied nowhere. [138]
*But it is not realized, it is already virtual, waiting to be born. [138]
*It emerges is patches, traces, just below the surface. [138]
*It flickers even before it has had a chance to develop its own autonomy, its irreversibility. [138]
*This crystallization of a free knowledge space, the creation of a new anthropological dimension, the passage from a point of no return, may never take place. [138]
*What is knowledge? [139]
*Each time a human being organizes or reorganizes his relationship to himself or his peers, to things, signs, or the cosmos, he is engaged in a form of knowledge, apprenticeship. [139]
*Knowledge, in the sense I am using he term, is a knowledge of living, a living-in-knowledge, one that is coextensive with life. [139]
*It is part of a cosmopolitan and borderless space of relations and qualities, a space for the metamorphosis of relationships and the emergence of ways of being, a space in which the processes of individual and collective subjectivization come together. [139]
*The knowledge space is the plane of composition, recomposition, communication, and singularization, where thought triggers thought in a continual process. [139]
*The knowledge space has always existed. [139]
*Noolithic: stone age of the mind. The stone is no longer silex but the silicon of microprocessors and fiber optic cable. [140]
*This fourth anthropological space, should it come into fruition, will harbor forms of self-organization and sociability that tend toward the production of subjectivity. [141]
*The intention of collective intellect is not to destroy the earth, or the territory, or the market economy. [141]
*On the contrary, the long-term existence of the first three spaces--survival--is without doubt conditioned by the resurgence of a new plane of existence for humanity. [141]

===Anthropological Space [143]===
====The Multiple Spaces of Signification [143]====
*Our interactions produce, transform and continuously develop heterogeneous and interlinked spaces. [143]
*A simple conversation could be seen as the shared construction of a virtual space of significance, which each speaker attempts to shape according to his mood and intentions. [143]
*These plastic spaces, [143]
*Lived spaces are relativistic. [143]
*They bend and shape themselves around objects they contain and which organize them. [143]
*The extent to which people, images, words and concepts are capable of structuring a space of signification depends on the affective force associated with them. [143]
*Evanescent spaces, like small bubbles that are form when two people meet and then disappear [143]
*We recognize the importance of a event within the intellectual, technical, social, or historical sphere by its ability to reorganize the proximities and distances in a given space, its ability to create new space-times(s), new proximity systems. [144]
*Human beings do not inhabit only a physical or geometric space, they simultaneously live in emotional, aesthetic, social, and historical spaces, spaces of signification in general. [144]
*The people standing around me on the subway are more distant, within affective space, than my daughter or father, who are three hundred miles away. [144]
*We live in thousands of different spaces, each with its own system of proximity (temporal, emotional, linguistic, etc.), such that a given entity can be near us in one space, yet quite distant in another. [144]
*Each space has its own axiology, its own system of values for measurement. [144]
*We spend our time modifying and improving the spaces in which we live, in connecting and separating them, articulating and solidifying them, introducing new objects, displacing the forces that structure them, jumping from one space to another. [145]
====Anthropological Spaces are Structuring, Living, Autonomous, and Irreversible [145]====
*The knowledge space didn't begin to shape itself with any degree of consistency until the twentieth century. [146]
*It is not some kind of abstract container for all possible knowledge. [146]
*On the contrary, it harbors a specific kind of knowledge and reorganizes, hierarchizes, and submerges within the active environment it comprises, modes of knowledge from the other anthropological spaces. [146]
====Anthropological Spaces are Planes of Existence, Contingent and Eternal Velocities [147]====
*Languages and narratives on earth, fields and clay tablets for the territory, printed matter and machines in the commodity space, digital networks, virtual universes, and artificial life in the knowledge space. [147]
*Anthropological spaces in themselves are neither infrastructures nor superstructures but planes of existence, frequencies, velocities, determined within the social spectrum. [147]
*Suddenly, humanity finds itself moving at a greater speed. [147]
*And this new speed brings a new space into being. [147]
*The earth provides the fundamental frequency. [147]
*The first space corresponds to the introduction of velocities exceeding those of animal life: the velocity of language, technology, and culture. [147]
*The territorial space introduces the first velocity perceptible at the individual level, that of writing and empire, bureaucracy and borders: torpor, the extended time of the territory. [148]
*With capitalism comes acceleration. [148]
*The knowledge space itself develops within the limits of real time, on the other side of "live". [148]
*These four velocities, these four frequencies, coexist. [148]
*And although the knowledge spaces appears along the horizon of thousands of projects, thousands of currents of contemporary society, although its formation is in my opinion eminently desirable, it may never achieve autonomy. [148]
*Thus the anthropological spaces are contingent. [148]
*And yet, once they take shape, even virtually, they become eternal, timeless, as if they had always already been there. [148]
*Is economy as a discipline anything more that the flattened, analytic form of the eternity of capital? [149]
*Humanity crosses the four spaces with its entire being: walking, its feet strike the great earth of myth, its hair rising to the cosmos and the gods; sitting, composed, it is inscribed on the territory; its arms work the commodity space, eyes and ears devouring the signs of the spectacle; its head represents the knowledge space, a brain connected to other brains, secreting the virtual worlds of collective intellect, wandering, navigating, re-creating a thousand other earths upon the pluralized sphere of artifice. [149] {fluidiom: data mining man work of art}
*Anthropological cartography is a checklist, a substrate of memory, a tool to help deploy every dimension of a being or process. [150]
*To gain some idea of the complexity involved in such an undertaking, imagine a notebook containing four pages (each page corresponding to an anthropological space) that have been torn, crumpled and rolled into a ball. Now suppose that a needle (representing the phenomenon to be mapped according to our projection system) is stuck into this ball of paper. The needle will pierce the same space several times. Each new needle stuck in the ball will intersect the four spaces differently, both in terms of the order and the number of times it enters them. [150]
*Shredded, torn, crumpled, pierced with hoe, inextricably folded within one another, earth, the territory, capital, and the virtual space of knowledge coexist everywhere differently. [150]

===Identity [151]===
*Each space corresponds to a separate identity, a style of desire, a physical structure. [151]
*There are terrestrial and territorial affects, commodity and knowledge affects. [151]
====Microcosm, Micropolis, and the Small House [151]====
*On earth, names, tattoos, blazons, totems, and masks are all signs that signify identity. [151]
*The definition of an individual by his participation in the clan, the blood line, the very ancient system of descendance and alliance, dates from the period of the great prehistoric earth. [151]
*The being is formed by a network of cosmic relations that define him and determine his status. [151]
*Exteriority becomes interiority: situated in the universe, the individual is a microcosm, an echo, a reflection of the whole. [151]
*Each part of his body, each movement of his soul, reflects events or places that exist in the world. [152]
*The Neolithic revolution provided a means by which individuals were attached to the soil and their existence recorded by the state, a mechanism that exists to this day. [152]
*Our relationship to territory, notably by means of landed property and its multiple avatars, defines the place of the individual in society, his identity. [152]
*But territorial identity is not limited to geography alone. [152]
*It involves position and rank in institutions, castes, hierarchies, civil service corps (teachers, mining engineers), orders (doctors, architects, the nobility or clergy), disciplines (paleontology, sociology), everything that organizes a space in terms of borders, ranks and levels. [152]
*The identity provided by a diploma, for example, combining both rank and discipline, is obviously a component of the territory and not the knowledge space. [152]
*The psychology of the territory is a hypostasized image of the social order. [153]
*The commodity space deterritorializes and destructures the older frameworks of sociability and identity. [153]
*Individuals are redefined according to their role in the fabrication, circulation, and consumption of goods, information, and images. [153]
*Within the commodity space the signs of identity are quantified: income, salary, bank accounts, "external signs of wealth". [153]
*We could say, to use an outdated terminology that identity depends on where we fall within the system of production and our position within the circuits of consumption and exchange. [153]
*In a world dominated by economy, the individual is no longer a microcosm or a micropolis, but a micro o√Økos. [153]
*The word "economy" is derived, by way of Latin, from the Greek o√Økos, house, and nomia, administration. [153]
*Identity is constructed through the relationship between parents and children, by means of an Oedipal triangulation. [153]
====Toward a Sapient Identity, or Polycosmos [154]====
*The emergence of a reality organized around knowledge can provoke a profound crisis of identity in which the older principles of self-orientation and identification in terms of a community lose their effectiveness. [154]
*What concepts, what methods are needed to reveal the knowledge space, and, at the same time, our individual identity within it? [154]
*One possible direction is suggested by the cosmopedia2 and the use of knowledge trees3. [154]
*Collective intellects emerge, interconnect, move, and change. [154]
*It is through the circulation, association, and metamorphosis of thinking communities that the knowledge space is born and perpetuated. [154]
*Each collective intellect harbors a virtual world that expresses the relations it maintains, the problems that activate it, the images it shapes from its environment, its memory, its knowledge in general. [154]
*Members of the collective intellect coproduce, develop, and continuously modify the virtual world that expresses their community: the collective intellect is always learning, always inventing. [154]
*A video game plunges the player into an imaginary territory, while the virtual world of collective intellect serves as a map, an instrument of location and orientation that refers to a real space, the most intensely real space we currently have, the space of living knowledge. [155]
*Since he participates in more that one collective intellect, he creates several knowledge blazons. [156] [The blazon is the image of an individual's apprenticeship (curriculum) as it appears on the knowledge tree of a community. See Les Arbres de connaisances, op. cit.)
*On earth, man is a micro cosmos, within territorial space, he is a micro polis, within commodity space, he has become a micro o√Økos, a small house, and within knowledge space, humanity is eve more restricted: He is nothing more than a brain. [156]
*Even his body becomes a cognitive system. [156]
*But the brain shapes itself collectively, makes contact with other brains, with systems of signs, language and intellectual technologies, it participates in thinking communities that explore and create multiple worlds. [156]
*Thus the brain of Homo sapiens sapiens turns in upon itself, unveils its obverse and transforms itself into a polycosm. [156] {fluidiom}
*Within the knowledge space, humanity becomes nomadic once again, pluralizes its identity, explores heterogeneous worlds, is itself heterogeneous and multiple, in the process of becoming, thinking. [156]
====Quantum Identities [156]====
*Is there a quantum mechanics of freedom? [157]
*Can we measure subjectivity? [157]
*The quanta of human qualities will be signs, and nothing more than signs. [157]
*Technically, the individual will be able to express himself by distributing dynamic ideograms throughout an indefinite number of virtual worlds. [160] {fluidiom}
*The economy of human qualities must provide an alternative to subjectivization by inclusion. [160]
*It can do this by allowing individuals to freely project an unlimited number of images of themselves throughout an unrestricted variety of collective spaces. [160]
*Thus each one of us will be able to invent our identities (our dances, our roles) by sharing in the construction of a large number of communities (balls, plays). [160]
*The individual becomes a molecular vector of collective intelligence, multiplying his active surfaces, complicating his interfaces, circulating among different communities, simultaneously enriching both his own identity and theirs. [160]
====Coexistence of the Four Identities [160]====
*Each of us possesses four types of identity, even though the first may be forgotten, even though the last has yet to make its appearance. [160]
*We are born and grow up within all four spaces simultaneously. [160]
*Our birth is not simply territorial (an entry in a list of records) and familial. [160]
*We are also born by and for the earth, and through our birth we inaugurate a cosmic existence. [160]
*But it is clear that the solutions to a number of our contemporary psychological, social, and cultural problems will be found in the discovery or rediscovery of other spaces. [161]
*We must learn to displace our identities, our affects, our vital forces toward the earth, rediscover our relationship to the cosmos. [161] {Joy}
*An identity made whole will cross the four spaces. [161]

=== Semiotics [163]===
====Semiotics of the Earth: Presence [163]====
*On earth the universe of signification reflects the reign of power and presence. [164]
*Along the uniform space of the great nomadic earth, beings signs, and things interconnect as rhizomes, exchange places, weave an unbroken canvas of meaning. [164] {fluidiom}
*This is the semiotic environment of primitives, animists, preliterate cultures, and very young children, characteristic of the unconscious and "primary processes". [164]
====The Semiotic of Territory: Division [164]====
*The separations and borders that divide territory insinuate themselves into the very heart of the relations of signification: Semiotic division becomes institutionalized. [165]
====The Semiotic of Merchandise: Illusion [166]====
*Within the commodity space, it is no longer only speech that is cut off from life. [166]
*Scenes and faces, landscapes and music, rites and spectacles, events of all kinds are indefinitely reproduced and distributed through books, newspapers, photographs, records, film, radio, tapes, and television, cut off from their context of emergence. [166]
*Multiplies by the media swept along thousands of pathways and channels, the sign becomes deterritorialized. [166]
*The great sign mall, the spectacle, thus becomes a kind of superreality through which every utterance, every image has to pass before it can become effective. [167]
*The sign's passage through media channels dethrones representation. "As seen on television" [167]
====The Knowledge Space: Semiotic Productivity [168]====
*The semiotic of the knowledge space is defined by the return of being, of real and living existence within the sphere of signification. [168]
*This escape from the world of absence, this resumption of contact with reality should obviously not be understood as a process of objectivization or relation tied to a given signified, a guaranty of signs by means of transcendence. [168]
*The art of the future will no longer force signs but post-media methods of communication. [169] {fluidiom}
*Coupled to sensorimotor, plastic, interactive, and multidimensional control systems, the images escapes the destiny of fascination traced for it by merchandise and becomes an instrument of watchfulness, knowledge, and invention more powerful than text. [170] {fluidiom}

=== Figures of Space and Time [173]===
====Earth: Immemorial Footprints [173]====
*The earth is mankind's memory, its landscape the map of mankind's epics, the storehouse of his knowledge. [173]
====Territory: Closure, Inscription, History [174]====
*Every time we build something, in the sense of engineering and architecture, in the sense of building for the long term we extend the empire of the territory. [174]
*Customs, counters, gates, locks constantly reestablish what is in and what is out. [176]
*Among the scribes, exams and competitions create barriers around knowledge. [176]
*There is a before and after only because there is an inside and an outside. [177]
====Commodity: Circuits, Real-Time [177]====
*The commodity space lives entirely within its circuits: on the highway or train, not on the landscape we cross, in the airplane, not in the village near the airport. [178]
*The individual links of the network continue to circulate in other networks: the television in our pocket, the headphones on our ears, the laptop in its case, the portable fax machine, the mobile phone. [178]
*Objects in motion within objects in motion combine their velocities, exchange messages, intersect a moving, realistic space, in which everything moves in relation to everything else, where distance means nothing and speed everything. [178]
*On the horizon of acceleration, in the eye of the hurricane of speed, real time, motionless, drives the space-time of commodity. [179]
*Real time is the reality of commodity time, its entelechy, its ideal: a time that is no longer sequential but parallel, no longer linear but instantaneous, the time of simultaneity, the limit of acceleration. [179]
*The most advanced form of real time occurs within organizations. [179]
*From flexible manufacturing systems to groupware, digital networks have brought about the dematerialization of organizational structure. [179]
*The ultimate deterritorialization: organization charts, production procedures, and administrative architectures are transferred to software and thereby mobilized and tamed. [179]
*The virtual enterprise adapts in real time tot the transformation of the market. [179]
*In this sense it is similar to the knowledge space. [179]
*But we can't get there by simply going faster. We need some sort of quantitative leap. [179]
*Different velocities, different intensities will animate intellects. [179]
====Knowledge: Subjective Time, Interior Space [179]====
*The knowledge space annuls deferral by changing the reference system: It is nourished in internal time. [180]
*In the concept of the knowledge tree6, for example, it is the curricula of individual apprenticeship that structure the knowledge tree of the community. [181]
*Yet these curricula are not synchronized with calendar time; the dates on which we obtain our diplomas are not shown. [181]
*An individual's cognitive blazons, projections of their curricula on the tree, no longer record a sequence of personal achievement, but individual abilities in an emerging collective order, that of the community tree, and thus enables individuals to orient themselves in terms of a specific situation, a context shared by all the other members of the collective intellect. [181]
====The Emerging Knowledge Space [182]====
*The collective intellect reverses the relationship between time and space that had been established by the territory. [182]
*The collective intellect, however, acts against the grain of territory since it transforms time into space. [182]
*The territory attempts to maintain borders, hierarchies, and structures. [183]
*The knowledge space on the other hand is always in an emergent state. [183]
*It is never structures a priori, but expresses, maps, makes visible the strands of subjective and necessary unforeseeable durations. [183] {see book for suggestions of appropriate brand names for accompanying software to be developed}
*The communities of intelligence flee the territory, escape the network of commodity for a knowledge space that they produce by thinking, dreaming, and wandering. [183]

===Navigational Instruments [185]===
====Earth: Narratives, Portolans, Algorithms [185]====
*The compass is a terrestrial device. [186]
*On earth, the principal instrument of knowledge is the narrative. [186]
*The abstract structure of the story is the algorithm: the description of a series of actions that occur in a certain order from a starting point to an end point. [186]
====Territory: Projection Systems [187]====
*Based on the time, the day, the astronomical tables, he could determine latitude. This is referred to as taking one's bearings. [187]
*This bearing is no longer an individual point, a landmark, a sign, a color of the water, a whirlpool, a mark on the earth-sea, but an abstract point, the projection on the surface of the earth of celestial coordinates. [187]
*A position in territorial space. [187]
*Each point on the map would now be indexed to the sky, pinned in place by the sphere of fixed stars. [188]
*In the new space the earth is divided up, enclosed in a net that falls from the heavens. [188]
*Each point is assigned a set of coordinates, an address, even though it remains unnamed. [188]
*The nomadic earth immobilized by the sky. [189]
====Commodity: Statistics and Probabilities [189]====
*In the commodity space there is no longer any possibility of fixing positions--beings, signs, or things--within a system. [189]
*Everything is in circulation; everything is in a stat of continuous flux. [189]
*They [the statistics] were used to draw up the moving maps of the commodity space. [189]
*But indispensable as these instruments are, in the absence of other means of orientation in the commodity space, they quickly reveal their drawbacks. [190]
*Individualities are no longer fixed by a system, as territorial space, but lumped together in a single mass. [190]
*The statistical profile masks individual features. [190]
*Processes are equated with molar equilibria, with states. [190]
*Qualities are reduced to quantities. [190]
====Knowledge: Cinemaps [190] {fluidiom}====
*Yet knowledge is born, runs, and dies at an even faster pace than commodities. [190]
*The main problem in the knowledge space is to organize the organizing, objectivize the subjectivizing. [190]
*Knowledge about knowledge is based on an essential circularity, one that is primordial, ineluctable. [190]
*Our understanding of understanding is ipso facto a transformation of knowledge, a perpetual deviation, a dynamic reorientation that is continuously reactivated and reevaluated. [190]
*The cartography of knowledge space cannot be based on statistics, which are purely quantitative. [191]
*Together wit Michel Authier, I have suggested a new type of orientation and navigation, especially designed for the knowledge space, which we refer to as a cinemap. [191] {fluidiom}
*A collective intellect navigates within a moving informational universe: A cinemap is the product of this interaction. [191] {fluidiom}
*Each object or group of objects in the universe under construction can be visualized on the cinemap. [191]
*We can measure the distances between these objects, or between an object and an attribute it doesn't yet possess, for example. [191]
*But since the cinemap expresses the relations among informational objects, it evolves and restructures itself at the same time as the actors modify themselves and new actors and new attributes appear. [192]
*Each member of the collective intellect can find his individual location on the cinemap. [192]
*In this case two possibilities present themselves. [192]
*In the first case the informational universe models the collective intellect itself, the diversity of its attributes, its behavior. [192]
*Here the individual is one of the object-actors who help structure the cinemap. [192]
*Obviously the individual can find his position on the map. [192]
*He is indexed by a constellation of icons. [192]
*His signature appears on the cinemap of the collective. [192]
*In the second, the object-actors of the informational universe do not model the members of the collective intellect but other data. [192]
*Here, individuals are still recorded on the cinemap according to their preferences, their interests, their relationship to the objects of the informational universe. [192]
*Their position on the cinemap, indirectly assigned this time, can again be visualized by a distribution of attributes, a configuration of sign-points. [192]
*By using a cinemap a group can shape itself into a collective intellect. [193]
*2001: the Odyssey of Knowledge. [193]

===Objects of Knowledge [195]===
*Within each anthropological space {aspace}, the most important objects of knowledge are the figures specific to that space. [195]
====The Object of Earth: The Eternal Becoming-Beginning [195]====
*On earth the object of the story is an origin. [195]
*But its stories are transmitted, perpetuated, related in cycles, varied. [195]
====The Object of Territory: Geometry [196]====
*The object of the territory is the measured earth, divided into sectors: geo-metry. [196]
====The Commodity Object: Flux, Fire, Crowds [197]====
*The characteristic object of the third space is obviously the production and consumption of commodities. [197]
*Economy is in some sense the geometry or cartography of the space opened up by generalized commodity exchange. [197]
*The objects of the commodity space are not only those of economy, but also everything that is distributed, flows, circulates, is transformed and perishes, everything that feeds its machinery and streams through its channels. [197] {fluidiom}
*It was in response to this sense of movement and exchange that thermodynamics, the science of the transformation of energy, was born in the nineteenth century, amidst the fire and steam of the industrial revolution. [197]
*For both the mathematical theory of information and cybernetics, the quantity of information carried by a message is inversely proportional to the probability of appearance of that message3 {Shannon}. [198]
*According to this definition, the quantity of information will be maximized if the message is completely random--which obviously clashes with common sense--and the quantity of information will approach zero if the message is highly redundant, if it contributes little to reducing our uncertainty about the state of the reference universe. [198]
*The information that is "sensed" is thus situated, the majority of the time, "between crystal and smoke", that is, between redundant order and chaos. [198]
*Information is apprehended by means of the mathematical instruments created by thermodynamics, ultimately, statistics and probability. [198]
*Much has been written about the analogy between noise in information theory, which corrodes, disorganizes, and punctures messages, and entropy in thermodynamics, which blurs distinctions and minimizes tension. [198] {fluidiom & tensegrity}
*Since noise not only destroys messages but also creates new information, the transition between energy and information provides the key to reversing organizational disorder, one of the mechanisms of self-organization. [198] {Kauffman}
*These speculations followed the economic changes that have been taking place since the end of the Second World War: Communication networks control the distribution of energy, the management of signs controls the production of material goods. [198]
*As the anthropological space of networks and deterritorialized acceleration continues to grow, physics becomes increasingly preoccupied with processes rather than laws, disequilibrium rather than states. [199]
====The Object of the Knowledge Space: Signification and Freedom [199]====
*Collective intellects are human communities in the act of self-communication and self-reflection, involved in the permanent negotiation of relations and contexts of shared signification. [199]
*In The Technologies of Intelligence, I suggested that the scope of the cognitive sciences be expanded and outlined a program of "cognitive ecology". [200]
*The system for the production and distribution of knowledge doesn't depend on the individual features of the human cognitive system alone, but also on collective methods of organization and the instruments with which information is communicated and processed. [200]
*Thus, cognitive ecology would focus on studying the interactions between the biological, social, and technical determinants of understanding. [200]
*It refers less to the way in which a sign refers to an object than to the relationship between an event and a context. [201]
*They are part of a contrived time, one that is moving, scattered with singularities, one that fashions the fabric of our lives. [201]
*Evaluation. Evaluation provides the human landscape with its sense of variation and difference. [201]
*Structure. Structural analysis only provides insights into static aspects of the paradigm. [202]
*Moreover, such structures are generally constructed manually, following some lengthy, and often questionable, effort of interpretation. [203]
*Structure is a modality of the system. [203]
*Structuralism is therefore an instrument of knowledge characteristic of territorial space, manipulated by professional interpreters, who distribute its objects in accordance with transcendent coordinates or categories, and reconstruct, in theory, all possible cases. [203]
*Statistics and probability. Probabilities, averages percentages, standard deviations, and variance, all tend to merge individual features, subjecting them to the standards they helped develop. [203]
*Although very common in sociology, demography, game theory, and other branches of the humanities, statistics and probability are instruments of the commodity space, and incapable of analyzing freedom and signification. [204]
*Computation. Computational linguistics does an excellent job of handling syntax but tells us little about the meaning of words in context. [204]
*They must first affect us before we can understand them. [205]
*In the knowledge space, each discovery is a creation. [205]
*Inhabited by individual signatures that rise, blend with one another, and then disappear, the space of sapience is olfactory. [205]
*Cinemaps enable collectives to singularize themselves, dynamically identify themselves in terms of the worlds they help bring into existence. [206] {fluidiom}
*For example, to using knowledge trees, collective intellects can continuously update their classification of knowledge while their skills and learning abilities in real time. [206] {fluidiom}
*Using health cinemaps, collective intellects can increase their medical skills, manage pharmaceutical and medical resources, combine epidemiology with the prevention, training, and empowerment of individuals. [206] {fluidiom}
*Using language cinemaps, collective intellects can prepare semantic diagrams of their communications, enabling readers to select the texts that interest them, providing authors with a writing tools, and enabling everyone to locate messages within an evolving global context.10 [206] {fluidiom: this is exactly what fluidiom should facilitate}
*Knowledge trees generate dynamic epistemologies as a byproduct. [206]
*They are primarily a form of self-management for learning and training. [206]
*In the knowledge space the preferred object of knowledge reflects the eternal becoming-beginning of earth, the perpetual resumption of becoming of the collective intellect and its world. [207]

===Epistemologies [209]===
====Earth: Flesh [209]====
*On earth, when an old man dies, a library goes up in flames. [209]

=====Table: Overview of the four spaces, The Relationship to Knowledge [210]=====
====Territory: The Book [211]====
*In territorial space, the subject of knowledge is the caste of literary specialists, hermeneuts, the guardians of systems. [211]
*It is shut off from the outside world like a sealed book. [211]
====Commodity Space: Hypertext [212]====
*In the third space knowledge is no longer enclosed, padlocked like a treasure. [212]
*It pervades everything, is distributed, mediatized, spreads innovation wherever it is found. [212]
*Our clumsy efforts to make use of the rigid corpses of aging disciplines are doomed to failure, since knowledge exits only at the shifting margins, the crossroads, in interference, when everything is a question of import-export. [213]
====The Knowledge Space: Cosmopedia [214]====
*In this fourth space the subject of knowledge is shaped by its encyclopedia. [215
*Because its knowledge is a knowledge of life, a living knowledge, it is what it knows. [215
*The philosophical tradition begun by Kant abandoned ontology, the question of being, and concentrated on epistemology, the theory of knowledge. [215]
*In contrast to Kant's critique, the perspective opened by the collective intellect shows that epistemology ultimately leads us back to ontology: there are as many qualities of being as there are ways of knowing. [215]
*Michel Authier and I refer to the new organization of knowledge and in this fourth space as the cosmopedia. [216]
*Why do we say that the sum of knowledge is now organized by the cosmos and not the circle? [216]
*Because instead of a one-dimensional text or even a hypertext network, we now have dynamic and interactive multidimensional representational space. [216] {fluidiom}
*Instead of the conjunction of image and text, characteristic of the encyclopedia, the cosmopedia combines a large number of different types of expression: static images, video, sound, interactive simulation, interactive maps, expert systems, dynamic ideographs, virtual reality, artificial life, etc. [216]
*At its extreme the cosmopedia contains as many semiotics and types of representation as exist in the world itself. [216]
*The cosmopedia multiplies nondiscursive utterances. [216]
*Depending on the zones of use and paths of exploration, hierarchies between users and designers, authors and readers, are inverted. [217]
*In the cosmopedia, all reading is writing. [218]
*The cosmopedia is a relativistic space, which curves when we read or write in it. [218]
*Inscription is a form of surgery (cutting, sewing, grafting, discontinuous operations in general). [218]
*Consultation, however, is a way of massaging or folding space (inflection, continuous operations). [218]
*Unanswered questions will create tension within cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required. [218] {fluidiom}
*the cosmopedia provides a new kind of simplicity. [218]
*Not some mutilating simplification applied violently from without, but an essential simplicity that results from the principle of organization inherent in the knowledge space. [218]
*Beyond the world of chaos and large numbers, beyond the incantations to complexity, simplicity is born of implication. [218]
*Simplification is the result of the considerable reduction of the importance of text in the exposition of knowledge, which results from the inclusion of relational information in the very structure of "cosmopedic space". [218]
*It is they who secrete and weave and sew and fold the knowledge space from within. [219]
*Once they plunge into the cosmopedia, space reorganizes around them, depending on their history, their interests, their questions, their previous utterances. [219]
*Once within, the member of the collective intellect swims around (navigates consults, questions, inscribes, etc.), then leaves. [219]
*Memory of the digital waters: His swimming has modified the structure of shared space as well as the shape and position of its image in the cosmopedia (his personal navigator). [219]
*It is the same for everyone, each time they dive into the cosmopedia. [220]
*Together, they organize the space, define, evaluate, color, heat, or cool it. [220]
*Each one helps build and order a space of shared signification by diving in, swimming around, and simply living in it. [220]
====The Philosophy of Implication [220]====
*In the knowledge space the object constructs the subject. [221]
*Once again, the object here is the perpetual renewal of the becoming of the collective intellect and its world. [221]
*It is as if the subject were fabricated by the subject.7 {autopoiesis} [221]
*As for the world, it is no longer an "objective" world, but the world of collective intellect, the world that thinks in it. [221]
*It is as if the object produced itself. [221]

===The Relationship between the Spaces: Toward a Political Philosophy [225]===
====Successive Eternities [225]====
*The economy of the earth is organized around gift-giving, spending, potlatch, communal sharing, and pure rapaciousness. [228]
*In territorial space the economy is administered and managed for the long term. [228]
*It is based on the regular collection of tributes, taxes, tithes and rent. [228]
*The economy is obviously capitalist in the commodity space, capitalist and thus exchange- and production-based, whereas preceding spaces are characterized by gift-giving, plunder, or rent. [228]
*The knowledge space may give rise to an economy of knowledge, some of whose underlying principles were discussed earlier. [228]
====Towards a Generalized Human Ecology [229]====
====Conditions and Constraints [231]====
====Semiotics Efficiency and "Inferior" Spaces [232]====
====Causality without Contact [233]====
*We can't buy or distribute the thought of a collective intellect. [234]
*We can only commercialize its projection on the commodity space, propagate unattached signs in the media market. [234]
====Release and Desire [236]====
*Each new anthropological space encloses the previous space, imposes its signification, its direction, its velocity on it. [236]
*The history of empire obscures the immemorial cycles of the earth, the accelerated rhythms of industry overturn the slow pace of peasant societies. [236]
*The subjective temporalities of collective intellects are in turn capable of modifying the real time of commodity networks. [236]
*The society of spectacle is that intermediary moment during which the informational sphere has already acquired some consistency without becoming fully autonomous with respect to commodity space. [236]
*Try to imagine the power of digital and media technologies in the service of the collective imagination, used for the continuous production of subjectivity, the invention of new qualities of being. [236]
*There are people in the commodity or territorial space who fear the establishment of a space for collective invention. [236]
*They are unaware that competition is impossible among the spaces. [236]
*Each space thinks and desires the others on its own terms, according to its own figures. [237
*The relationships just described are harmonious. [238]
*The spaces above spread their substance throughout the spaces below them. [238]
*The lower spaces desire the spaces above. [238]
*The ideal is achieved when the knowledge space assumes autonomy, becomes irreversible, and imagining collectives polarize anthropological gravitations, sentiments, and circulation, thus establishing the most fluid and unfettered system of relations possible. [238]
*The word "knowledge" here doesn't imply that power will be given to intellectuals, researches, experts. [239]
*It does not define some ideal state of perfection, but the principle of self-organization, the continuous self-invention of human communities and their worlds. [239]
====The Four Cardinal Points [239]====
*Having indicated the form of the harmonious relationships among the spaces, we can now more clearly identify the cacophonous relationships among them, those that almost inevitably lead to evil and servitude, stifle ontological invention, and destroy life. [239]
*The most harmful relationships are those that occur when the bottommost spaces attempt to violently control those above. [239]
*Evil arises from the earth's desire to control territorial space, when the tribes destroy one another in their attempt to gain possession of the state, when a clan chief becomes the head of government. [239]
*The absolute domination of the commodity space by the territory gives rise to a controlled economy, or planned poverty. [240]
*In large (and small) companies, state-like bureaucracies interfere with economic initiatives, administrative routine stifles inventions, authoritarian control and separation prevent collective intelligence from spreading. [240]
====Emptiness and Plenitude [241]====
*By establishing ports, canals, locks, gates, the parasite pretends to promote circulation, but ends up creating its own territory. [242] {Microsoft?}
*Other intermediaries are always required. [242]
*This is the infernal logic of parasitic inflation. [242]
*The knowledge space is not simply a way out of the territorial labyrinth but a bridge between the three previous spaces. [242]
*It enables the earth, the territory, and commodity space to communicate with another. [242]
*The earth is eternally full. [243]
*It is the space of the gift, of gratuitousness, of endless profusion and ever-present meaning. [243]
*Territorial and commodity space operate through loss. [243]
*Absence, castration, and deferral crisscross territorial space. [243]
*In the commodity space, loss takes the form of need. [243]
*Yet the knowledge space is not always full, like the earth, and lacks nothing, unlike the territorial and commodity spaces. [243]
*The knowledge space is exposed to the void. [243]

==Epilogue: Voyage to Knossos [245]==
*The possible encompasses systems of non-contradictory facts. [245]
*While these do not contradict any known physical laws, they do not take present circumstances into account. [245]
*The feasible, on the other hand, represents a much more limited range of items than the possible. [245]
*Action lies at the interface between the feasible and fact. [245]
*A living and permeable membrane, an active and subtle filter, action transforms feasibility into fact, extends the domain of the effective and transforms the realizable. [245]
*Technology, in the broadest sense of the word, refers to any event whose effect will be to shift the boundary between the possible and the feasible. [246]
*The idea of collective intelligence does not defer the question of happiness. [251]
*Far from implying any form of self-sacrifice, it encourages us to increase the degrees of freedom of individuals and groups, to implement win-win strategies, to create synergies between knowledge and knower. [251]
*The collective intelligence has no enemies. [251]
*It doesn't fight power; it abandons is. [251]
*Globalization (which turns all wars into civil wars) and nationalism, [251]

==© Copyright 2000 Martien van Steenbergen==
====End of note taking, Saturday August 5, 2000, 21:21====

{{succes en plezier}}

Collective Intelligence

2010-03-21T12:18:42Z

Martien: 3 versies: import van wiki.aardrock.com

[[Image:Collective-Intelligence-Pierre-Levy.gif|right]]

*Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace.
*Key words: '''nomadic earth, molar technologies, anthropological spaces, collective intellect, informational universe, commodity space, knowledge space, molecular politics, preceding spaces, collective intelligence, agent intellect, territorial space, intelligent city, fourth space, angelic body, intelligent communities, intelligent community, intellectual technologies'''.
*ISBN 0-7382-0261-4
*Pages in book: 277.
*Translated by Robert Bononno.
*Copyright © 1997 Robert Bononno.
*First printing 1999.
*Read by Martien van Steenbergen, April-May 2000.
*Survey/Review Copyright © 2000 by Martien van Steenbergen, 2000-05-06.
*Numbers in square brackets refer to corresponding page number, e.g. [13].
*Relevant superscripts1 refer to the corresponding chapter notes in the back of the book.
*{Text in braces are personal notes.}
*{fluidiom} refers to Gerald de Jong's Fluidiom project. Search for "fluid" (not "{fluidiom}, that'll be too restrictive) and you'll find some very interesting thoughts. See also [http://www.fluidiom.com http://www.fluidiom.com].
*{Joy} refers to Bill Joy's article titled "Why the future doesn't need us", published in Wired magazine in May 2000 (Wired 7.05). See also [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html]
*{Kauffman} refers to Stuart Kauffman's book "At home in the Universe", on complexity, self-organization, and emergent complex systems.
*{gossip} refers to Tryllian's "Agents on the move.", see [http://www.tryllian.com http://www.tryllian.com].

===Foreword [vii]===
*Foreword by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Miami, Florida.
*Computers and social theory. [vii]
*Deeply cultural and philosophical, metaphysical and utopian. [vii]
*Douglas Engelbart: computers can be used to augment intellect. [viii]
*Lévy's starting point is grounded in social, economic and political structures. [ix]
*The prosperity of a nation, geographical region, business, or individual depends on their ability to navigate the knowledge space. [ix]
*The Knowledge Space takes precedence over the spaces of earth, territory and commerce that preceded it. [ix]
*Lévy is attempting to map or create a detailed cartography of these spaces and their interrelationship [ix]
*The Knowledge Space is also referred to as the cosmopedia. [ix]
*The cosmopedia, as knowledge space around which the new collective intelligence is organized goes beyond the image and text characteristic of print-based encyclopedias. [ix]
*New computer technologies such as the Internet and World Wide Web will serve to filter and help us navigate knowledge, and enable us t think collectively rather than simply haul masses of information around with us. [x]
*Collective intelligence is a universally distributed intelligence. [xi]
*No one knows everything, and everyone knows something. [xi]
*We are passing from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think). The computer is the instrument that makes this utopian ideal possible. [xi]
*We are moving from a typographic or modern culture into a post-typographic or post-modern culture. The parallels to the transition from Medieval to Renaissance culture--from a largely oral and spoken to a text and print-based culture seam clear. [xi]

===Prologue: The Nomad Planet [xix]===
*This book is intended to promote that development from an anthropological perspective and forge a positive vision. [xxii]
*We have again become nomads. [xxii]
*We are moving from one humanity to another. [xxiii]
*Terra incognita. [xxv]
*Time now is errant, oblique, indeterminate, like that which precedes all origins. [xxv]
*Over the course of several millennia, however, homo habilis became sapiens, crossed a similar threshold, went forth into the unknown, invented the earth, the gods, and the infinite world of signification. [xxvii]
*First, we will have at our disposal simple and practical means for knowing what we are doing as a group. Second, we will be able to manipulate, much more easily than we are able to write, the instruments for collective utterance. [xxviii]

==Collective Intelligence: Mankind's emerging world in cyberspace==

===Introduction [1]===
====Economy [1]====
*The prosperity of a nation, geographical region, business, or individual depends on their ability to navigate the knowledge space. [1]
*Power is now conferred through the optimal management of knowledge, whether it involves technology, science, communication, or our "ethical" relationship with the other. [1]
*The more we are able to form intelligent communities, as open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagination, and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure our success in a highly competitive environment. [1]
*The service sector itself is increasingly coming under siege by a variety of technological objects. It is becoming industrialized, as characterized by the presence of ATMs, web sites, educational software, expert systems, etc. [2]
*Businesses tend to organize themselves in such a way that they are receptive to innovation networks. [2]
*Once the process of renewal slows down, the company or organization is in danger of petrification and extinction. As Michel Serres has written, knowledge has become the new infrastructure. [2]
*Totalitarism collapsed in the face of new forms of mobile and cooperative labor. It was incapable of collective intelligence. [3]
*The continuous production of subjectivity will most likely be the major economic activity throughout the next century. [4]
*Individuals and microcorporations are more capable than large companies of continuous reorganization and optimal enhancement of the individual skills tat are currently the requirements for success. [4]
*We are witnessing the development of complex forms of confrontational interdependence among skill zones that are fluid, delocalized, based on the singularities, and agitated by permanent molecular movements of association and rivalry. [5]
*The ability to rapidly form and reform intelligent communities will become the decisive weapon of regional skill centers competing within a globalized economic space. [5]
====Anthropology [5]====
*What is an anthropological space? It is a system of proximity (space) unique to the world of humanity (anthropological), and thus dependent on human technologies, significations, culture, conventions, representations and emotions. [5]
*Four anthropological spaces: earth, territorial space, commodity space, knowledge space.
*Earth: homo sapiens: The first item on our resumé is generally our name, our symbolic inscription within an ancestral line. [6]
*Territorial space: Agriculture, city, state, writing: Today, along with our name, we have an address, which serves to identify ourselves within the territory of residents and taxpayers. [6]
*Commodity space had a deterritorializing effect.
*The commodity space did not eliminate the preceding spaces, it outpaced them. [7]
*On our resumé, right after our name (position on earth) and our address (position within the territory), we generally indicate our profession (position in the commodity space). [8]
*The knowledge space will control preceding spaces, rather than eliminate them. [8]
*Our living knowledge, skills and abilities are in the process of being recognized as the primary source of all other wealth. [9]
*Internetworked data would then provide the technical infrastructure for the collective brain or hypercortex. [9]
====The Social Bond and Its Relationship to Knowledge [10]====
*Collective intelligence, as the term is used in this book, is a global project whose ethical and aesthetic dimensions are as important as its technological and organizational aspects. [10]
*This vision of the future is organized around two complementary axes: the renewal of the social bonds through our relation to knowledge and collective intelligence itself. [11]
*By establishing the social bond on the basis of our relationship to knowledge, we will encourage growth of a deterritorialized civility that coincides with contemporary sources of power while incorporating the most intimate forms of subjectivity. [11]
*Knowledge trees enable us to encounter the other as a bundle of knowledge, within the knowledge space and no longer as name, address, profession or social status. [12]
====What is Collective Intelligence? [13]====
*Collective intelligence is a form of universal distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills. [13]
*The basis and goal of collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostasized communities. [13]
*Intelligence is constantly enhanced. [14] {Engelbart: Constantly better in getting better.}
*Intelligence is coordinated in real time. [14]
*Skills are effectively mobilized. [15]
*Collective intelligence must not be confused with totalitarian projects involving the subordination of individuals to transcendent and fetishistic communities. [16]
*In an ant colony, the individuals are dumb; they have no collective vision and no awareness of how their actions are integrated with those of other individuals. But although individual ants might be stupid, their action results in an emergent behavior that is globally intelligent. [16]
*The ant colony is the opposite of collective intelligence in the sense that I am using the expression. Far from leading us in the direction of the knowledge space, the ant colony precedes the earth. Any attempt to assimilate the operation of society to that of an ant colony should be considered barbarous and reprehensible. [16]
*Through processes of transmission, invention, or forgetfulness, heritage becomes an element of individual responsibility. [17]
*Individual acts are coordinated and evaluated in real time, according to a large number of criteria that are themselves constantly re-evaluated in context. [17]
*We pass from the Cartesian cogito to cogitamus. [17]

==Engineering the Social Bond [21]==

===The Just: The ethics of Collective Intelligence [23]===
*If our human world has lasted until the present, it is because the just are still with us, because the traditions of hospitality, assistance, openness, care, recognition, and constructiveness are, in the end, more common or stronger than exclusion, indifference, negligence, resentment, and destruction. [25] {Bill Joy: the world doesn't need us}
*Sodom and Gomorra: But not all cities were destroyed, ad our presence on earth proves that, until now and throughout the world, the "quantity of good" has exceeded the "quantity of evil". [25] {Joy}
*Evil is everywhere and always visible, while the good (activity of the just) can only be discovered after a detailed, on-the-spot investigation (the angels visit Sodom), or by its indirect effects, the culmination of a painstaking process of reasoning. [25] {these pages have an excellent explanation of the barter between God and Abraham about Sodom and Gomorra.}
*Hospitality is the act of attaching the individual to a community. In every respect, it is the opposite of exclusion. [26]
*Why didn't Lot succeed in saving Sodom? Because collective force is required to sustain a community. [27]
*The just are efficient; they are able to maintain the existence of a community, only when they form a collective intelligence. [27]
*If the just are able to prevent destruction, it is because the good is closely associated with being, and more importantly, the capacity for being, or strength. And perhaps it is still more closely associated with the increase of strength. [28]
*If strength is good, power is bad, for it is measured by its capacity to limit strength, by its potential for destruction. [28]
*Power creates fear. [28]
*Power is boisterous; it prevents the community from communicating with itself. [28]
*Power comes into being and sustains itself only by impoverishing the qualities of being around it. [28]
*The just avoid power. [28]
*Abraham invented the process of engineering the social bond. [29]

===Human Qualities: The Economy of Collective Intelligence. [31]===
*The economy will center, as it does already, on that which can never be fully automated, on that which is irreducible: the production of the social bond, the relational. [31]
*This implies not only an economy of knowledge, but a more general, human economy, one that comprises the economy of knowledge as one of its subsystems. [31]
*When global relations and social interactions create a situation in which competition is based on common interest, then competition shifts to the domain of ethics. [32]
*We are forced to conclude that scarcity is socially manufactured, that poverty and exclusion are organized, even if they are not intentionally promoted. [33]
*In the economy of the future, capital will be the total individual. [34]
*Those who manufacture things will become scarcer and scarcer. [34]
*Information processing skills will no longer be needed. [34]
*The final frontier will be the human itself, that which can't be automated: the creation of sensible worlds, invention, relation, the continuous recreation of the community. [35]

===From the Molar to the Molecular: The Technology of Collective Intelligence [39]===
*Table: The Major Technological Evolutions [41]
====Life [42]====
*Natural selection could be considered a technology that life applies to itself. On the human level its effects take place with infinite slowness. [42] {Guszti Eiben: multisexual reproduction can speed it up considerably.}
*Artificial selection represents the next most important biological technology. Using he same basic processes as natural selection, it innovates by finalizing and accelerating the formation of species. [43]
*The creation of a species depended on geological (natural selection is measured in thousand-year units), hen historical (artificial selection takes place in several generations) time periods, and is now beginning to take place in real time, immediately (biotechnology is measured in terms of man-months, hardware and dollars). [43]
*The slogan of contemporary biotechnology could be: gene by gene, molecule by molecule. [43]
====Matter [43]====
====Information [45]====
====Human Communities [50]====
*In learning to control life, we tend toward finely granulated modes of action, those that are targeted, precise, rapid, economic, qualitative, discrete, calculated and carefully implemented at a specific moment in time, while closely following the continuous evolution of goals and situations. [50]
*Families, clans, and tribes are organic groups. Nations institutions, religions, large corporations, as well as revolutionary "masses" are organized groups, molar groups, which undergo a process of transcendence or exteriority in forming and maintaining themselves. [51]
*Finally, self-organized, or molecular groups realize the ideal of direct democracy within very large communities in the process of mutation and deterritorialization. [51]
*No organic group can exist unless each of its members knows the names of the others. [52]
*Within a collectivity of this type, individuals obey rules, follow traditions, and respect codes. [52]
*In systems organized around molecular politics, groups [] attempt to enhance their individual qualities indefinitely. [53]
*Able to reorganize itself in real time, minimizing delays, deadlines, and friction, the molecular group evolves at room temperature, without sudden change. [53]
*It [the politics] makes use of every human act, enhances individual qualities. [53]
*Rather it brings into being an immanent social bond, one that emerges through one-to-many relations. [54]
*The multiplication of molecular communities assumes the relative decline of media-based communication that is receptive to collective intelligence, a space that becomes increasingly navigable and accessible as molecular technologies become operational and available at low cost. [54]
*Real-time, large-scale collective intelligence thus requires a sufficient technical infrastructure. [54]
*Within the human sphere, molecular technologies provide groups and the individual with the instruments for selectively enhancing themselves, quality by quality. [54]
*Such technologies promote mutual recognition and synergy among anthropic qualities. [54]
*The members of a molecular community communicate laterally, reciprocally, outside categories and hierarchies, folding and refolding, weaving and reweaving, complicating the great metamorphic fabric of their peaceful cities. [55] {fluidiom}

===The Dynamics of Intelligent Cities: A Manifesto for Molecular Politics [57]===
*My approach is a utopian one, based on a form of direct, computer-mediated democracy--a virtual agora--that is more appropriate than current representative systems in helping us cross the turbulent waters of anthropological mutation. [57]
====Technology and Politics [58]====
*It is essential that we begin to imagine, experiment with, and actively promote, within this new communications space, organizational structures and decision-making styles that are oriented toward a deepening of our sense of democracy. [59]
====Inadequacy of Government Structures [59]====
*The cooperative parallel processing of problems will require the design of intelligent tools for filtering data, navigating within the information stream, and simulating complex systems; tools for lateral communication; and the mutual recognition of individuals and groups on the basis of their activities and skills. [61]
*It is likely that some of the emerging technologies for the interactive construction and visualization of the spaces of signification will enable us to move in this direction. [61] {fluidiom}
====Will the Virtual Agora be Limited to an Elite? [61]====
*It is not unreasonable to assume that in a few years' time the majority of households could also be equipped with terminals (cybergates) that are part of a communications system designed around a many-to-many spatial configuration. [63]
*Cooperative cyberspace must be designed as a form of public service. [63]
====Representative and Direct Democracy [63]====
====The formation of a Collective Voice [66]====
*Collectivity is not necessarily synonymous with solidity and uniformity. [66]
*Certain forms of organization enable individuals to differentially participate in a final, complex utterance: Books or articles can be written by several authors; film credits can include everyone's contribution to the production, so can plays, newspapers, etc. [67]
*To be completely free, however, the voice of the community should hang on its breath; it should flow ceaselessly and renew itself in real time. [67]
*For individuals, this [real time democracy] is especially difficult because each of them is at the same time called upon to (1) listen to the other members of the chorus, (2) sing slightly out of register, and (3) find a point of harmonious coexistence between his own voice and that of the others, that is, improve the overall effect of the ensemble. [67]
*Singers must therefore resist three "harmful attractors": the desire the voice of their neighbors by singing too loudly, the urge to remain silent, and the tendency to sing in unison. [68]
*This mediation could be immanent rather than transcendent. [68]
====Dynamic of the Intelligent City [69]====
*From a political perspective, the major phases in the dynamic of collective intelligence are listening, expression, decision-making, evaluation, organization, connection, and vision, all of which are interrelated. [70]
*The term "listening" is preferable to communication because it evokes emptiness of a vacuum rather than the fullness of a channel. [71]
*Listening reverses the direction of the media. [71]
*Real time democracy maximizes the responsibility of the citizen called upon to make decisions, accept the consequences of those decisions, and make judgments on the basis of those decisions. [73]
*Organization follows from the actions that precede it. [73]
*The assignment of responsibilities and resources, it is to be efficient, that is, capable of stimulating processes rather than simply strengthening territorial space, must of necessity be part of a continuous cycle of listening, expression, decision-making, and evaluation. [73]
*A basic phase in the cycle of collective intelligence, the organization becomes a self-organization, or rather, it appears as the organizing moment of a more universal self-organization. [74]
*In the context of the intelligent city, organization cannot be conceived without its disorganizing complement: the lateral connection. [74]
*Vision […] should rather be seen as an act of seeing, the flowering of a collective vision, a vision of the self in the process of becoming. [75]
*This vision is the product of our previous acts: listening, expression decision, evaluation, organization, connection. [75]
*This vision does not come from above; it is not the act of an organ distinct from collective intelligence. [75]
*It [this vision] emerges from interactions and contacts, circulation, encounters. [75]
*Appropriately distributed, global vision is reflected and diffracted in individual projects and strategies, orients and polarizes molecular processes. [76]
*Vision is the emerging and global aspect of listening. [76]
====Real-time democracy [76]====
*In contrast, real time democracy initiates a period of decision-making and continuous evaluation, during which a responsible community knows that it will eventually be confronted with the results of its current decisions. [80]
*Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior. Panic, collective enthusiasm, etc. are the result of the epidemic propagation of emotion and representation among masses of isolated individuals. [81]
====Totalitarism and the Economy of Human Qualities [82]====
*Doesn't this real time democracy mask a new form of totalitarism? … Big brother is watching you?
*But real time democracy is organized not around the vision of power over a society (totalitarism), not around the spectacle of power (the media), but the communication of the community with itself, knowledge of the community's self. [82]
====Power and strength [87]====
*Strength makes things possible; power serves to hinder. [87]
*Strength can liberate, power subordinates. [87]
*Strength accumulates energy; power squanders it. [87]
*Power results in loss. [89]
*A shift has occurred, therefore, from democracy (from the Greek démos, people, and cratein, to command) to a state of demodynamics (Greek dunamis force, strength). [88] It comes into being from the cycle of listening, expression, evaluation, organization, lateral connection, and emerging vision. It encourages real time regulation, continuous cooperative apprenticeship, optimal enhancement of human qualities and the exaltation of singularity. [88]
*Demodynamics does not imply a sovereign people, one that is reified, fetishized, attached to a territory, identified by soil or blood, but a strong people, one perpetually engaged in the process of self-knowing and self-creation, a people in labor, a people yet to come. [89]

===Choreography of Angelic Bodies: The Atheology of Collective Intelligence [91]===
*…introducing some medieval theological notions of collective intelligence and imagination. [91]
====The Farbian Tradition [92]====
*This "collective consciousness" was referred to as the agent intellect by these Aristotelian mystics because it was an ever active intelligence, one that constantly contemplated true ideas and enabled human intelligences to become active (and therefore effective) by directing toward them all the ideas that it perceived or contemplated. [92]
*This shared intellect links men to God, a God who is fundamentally conceived as self-reflexive thought, a knowing divinity and form of knowledge rather than an all-powerful deity, a pure intelligence for whom creativity is only an afterthought. [92]
*Following Aristotle, Farbian theology was less concerned with the power or strength of God than with His enigmatic manner of thinking, His eternal self-contemplation. [93]
*God is not infinitely more than we are (more powerful, wiser, more just, etc.), but radically different: an absolute unit of thought engaged in self-reflective thinking. [94]
====The Agent Intellect [94]====
*In the theology of Al-F√£r√£bî and Avicenna, God does not create the world through some special act of will, there is no "coup d'état within eternity" but a series of necessary and eternal consequences of the act of self-reflective divine thought. [94]
*The world emanates from God as an afterthought because of the overabundance of His intelligence, according to an immaterial causality that the neo-Platonic philosophers referred to as procession or emanation. [94]
*Through God's contemplation of His own thought emanates the First Separate Intelligence, or First Cherub. [94]
*It is referred to as a separate Intelligence to emphasize the fact that is "pure" and not attached to any physical entity. [94]
*This First Separate Intelligence is engaged in three distinct forms of contemplation from which three consequences follow. [94]
*First, it contemplates the principle that is the cause of its necessary existence, which is God. Through this First Intelligence's contemplation of God's thought, a Second Separate Intelligence emanates. [94]
*Second, the First Intelligence contemplates itself as a necessary emanation of God. From this contemplation arises the soul that drives the First Heaven. [94]
*Third, the First Intelligence contemplates the possibility of its existence in itself, independent of the principle from which it emanates. From this third contemplation, which is the darkest, the lowest, the body of the First Heaven emanates. [94]
*In its turn the Second Intelligence, or Second Cherub, (1) contemplates its principle, which is the First Intelligence; (2) contemplates itself as emanation from the First Intelligence; and (3) contemplates itself independent of its principle. [95]
*From these contemplations arise (1) the Third Intelligence; (2) the soul that drives the Second Heaven; and (3) the ethereal body of the Second Heaven. [95]
*This process continues through the Tenth Separate Intelligence. [95]
*The motive souls, or celestial angels, are characterized by imagination, a pure imagination independent of the senses, which enables them to represent themselves and desire the Intelligence from which they proceed. [95]
*The love of the celestial angels sets the heavens in motion (from which the expression motive soul), a motion that is eternal since these souls never achieve the Intelligences they desire. [95]
*Thee divine influx, from which the cherubim, angels, and heavens arise, ends by exhausting itself. [95]
*The process of emanation culminates with the Tenth Separate Intelligence, or agent intellect. [95]
*This agent intellect is also referred to as "the Angel". [95]
*When used without any other modifier, the definite article indicates the angel of knowledge and revelation, the angel who intercedes directly with humanity. [95]
*Through the Angle's contemplation of itself, independent of its principle, emanates not the rarefied body of a heaven but the distribution, explosion, and opacity of sub lunar matter, the coarse substance of our base world. [95]
*Through the Angel's contemplation of itself as a product of the Ninth Intelligence emanates not the motive soul of a sphere, a celestial angel, but the multitude of human souls whose thick sensual imagination moves the material bodies. [95]
*Finally, the most eminent form of thought accessible to the Tenth Separate Intelligence is obviously the contemplation of its principle (the Ninth Intelligence). [96]
*From this contemplation emanate all the forms of terrestrial bodies as well as the ideas of forms of knowledge present in those human souls disposed to receive them. [96]
*The agent intellect is the irradiating source of all the forms and ideas of the sub lunar world we inhabit. [96]
*Humans are always potential intelligences but they can only act (that is, following Aristotelian terminology, become truly intelligent and knowing) when they are illuminated by the Angel. [96]
*Intelligible forms stream from the agent intellect, and when they reach suitably receptive souls, they enable the transition from potential (possible) to active knowledge (real). [96]
*We are thus actively intelligent only because of the agent intellect, shared by all humanity, which is a kind of "collective consciousness". [96]
*For mankind, the greatest happiness is obviously its unity with the agent intellect, the ability to fully and completely capture the angelic emission. [96]
*But the process of emanation doesn't end here. The divine influx is received by our rational faculty with varying degrees of intensity. [96]
*Some individuals receive a superabundance of ideas from the agent intellect. [96]
*Ideas percolate through their rational faculty toward their spiritual imagination, and they redistribute what they have received by prophesying to other men and women. [96]
*It is from this prophetic source that knowledge continues to expand "horizontally", from human soul to human soul, until the initial influx is exhausted. [96]
*Those who lack the gift of prophecy but yet receive the illumination of forms with sufficient strength become teachers, writers, and legislators, by power of reason alone, transmitting in their turn, from one to another, this knowledge of divine origin. [96]
*Like the prophet, they serve as retransmitters. [96]
*Others do not receive ideas from the agent intellect with sufficient force to distribute their knowledge, but have enough for their individual perfection. [96]
*Yet others, like a television whose antenna is poorly oriented, have arranged their soul in such a manner that the Angel only illuminates them at rare intervals, if at all, and although all humans are potentially intelligent, some are incapable of making this intelligence active. [97]
====From Angelic to Virtual Worlds [97]====
*Redefined from a human perspective, the angelic regions open the communications space of communities to themselves without the intervention of the divinity, or any form of transcendent representation for that matter (revealed law, authority, or other a priori forms imposed from above). [97]
*Virtual worlds will be instruments of self-knowledge and self-definition for humanity, which can then form itself into autonomous and autopoietic collective intellects. [98]
*In place of the ubiquitous agoras and cosmic simulations, these immanent heavens provide cinemaps, dynamic descriptions of the world below, moving images of the events and situations into which human communities are plunged. [98] {fluidiom}
*They are home to the "angelic bodies" (or virtual images) of the members of collective intellects--whether individuals or groups--impelling them toward self-awareness and mutual contact. [98]
*Synthesizing the complexity and transformations of the terrestrial world, virtual worlds enable intelligences to communicate with one another and assist individuals and groups navigating collective knowledge. [98]
*Through these virtual worlds, the world below will continue to proliferate, mutate, and open new pathways of individualization that will, in turn, nurture the "angelic space". [98]
*The greater the number pf collective intellects with which an individual is involved, the more opportunities he has to diversify his knowledge and desire. [99]
*Moreover, he is enabled to enrich with his living variety the thinking communities he helps to construct. [99]
*In each virtual world we traverse, we will clothe different angelic body. [99]
*Rather than directing upon mankind the intellectual light that descends from God via the heavens and superior angels, the virtual world that serves as agent intellect reflects the light that emanates from human communities. [99]
====Enigma and Desire [100]====
*In the context of theological discourse illumination comes from above, and the Angel's, or God's, representative distributes it among mankind. [100]
*According to our humanist version, the individual who is most capable of accepting the lower world that surrounds him and receiving the teachings (most often and unconscious) of the richness and diversity he has finally mastered. [100]
*Theology outlined a unidirectional pattern of distribution, one that descends from above before spreading outward with centrifugal force. [101]
*Anthropology embodies a form of centripetal circulation that rises from below and showers us with a rain that, even as it falls, anticipates future ascensions of newly concentrated knowledge. [101]
*With the space that emanates from the collective intelligence, I thus encounter the human other, no longer as flesh and blood, as social rank, an owner of things, but as an angel, an active intelligence--active for himself but potential for me. [102]
*Should he ever agree to expose his face of light, when I discover the angelic body of the other, I will contemplate his life in knowledge or his knowledge of life, the projection of his subjective world upon the immanent heaven of the collective intellect. [102]
*Because I do not know what he knows, because our becomings differ, he is, within this space, a unique, incomparable figure of desire: His angelic body reveals this to me as enigma and alterity. [102]
*It is in this way that the other world, or mystery, of theology becomes the world of the other, or enigma, of anthropology. [103]
*Among the medieval philosophers love rose from the soul toward the superior intelligences. [103]
*In our humanist system it is by their passage through virtual worlds, by acquiring an angelic body, that souls can best imagine humanity, from which perhaps follows, along with the desire of learning, he growth of friendship among men. [103]
*When referring to those who cease learning, we no longer speak of ignorance but of closure, a delayed life, a rigidity that is impermeable to the proliferation of strength, a refusal to encounter the other as angel, a fear of enigma and desire. [103]
====The Problem of Evil [103]====
*Obscurity and matter, or evil, occur because intelligences contemplate themselves as existing independently of the superior principle from which they emanate. [103]
*Men forget to turn toward the agent intellect, the separate intelligence neglects the superior intelligences, the First Separate Intelligence contemplates itself without God. [103]
*What is the cause of evil from the present humanist perspective?
*Collective intellects may be tempted to consider virtual worlds as realities in themselves, forgetting the living human beings from which they arise and of which the are merely the expression. [103] {team}
*This is their dark side. [103]
*Any illusionary autonomization of the figure of the community, any idolatrous fixation on its countenance, ant transcendent becoming of the knowledge space will give rise to evil. [103]
*In such a case, the question of truth is substituted for the uninterrupted dynamic of learning and exploration. [103]
*Mystery and terror replace enigma and desire. [103]
*Exclusion succeeds mutual recognition. [103]
*And ultimately, forgetfulness of the living and present origin of virtual worlds, their reification, their separation from the innumerable human sources from which they originate will inevitably introduce the obsessive problem of power within a space where it does not belong. [104]
*We can the pose the following absurd question: Who will control such virtual worlds? This is like asking who will speak in the name of the community within these virtual worlds, when such worlds are precisely the very means of self-organization, self-definition, and autonomous self-construction of the community within the knowledge space. [104]
*Any assumption of control by a small splinter group, any petrification of living, collective expression, any evolution toward transcendence immediately annihilates the angelic nature of a virtual word, which falls at once into the obscure regions of domination, power, belonging and exclusion. [104]
*I am aware that many claim that self-organization is impossible; they cannot conceive of a space in which the question of power does not arise, they consider knowledge a territory to be divided up or a network to be controlled. [104]
*I can only encourage them to continue their explorations in an attempt to enlarge their subjective world. [104]
*The angels of the living unite to perpetually form and re-form the Angel of the collective, the moving of the radiant body of human knowledge. [104]
*The Angel does not speak. [104]
*It is itself the aggregate voice or choral chant that rises from an acting and thinking humanity. [104]
====The Intellect, the Intelligible, the Intelligent [104]====
*This implies a relationship to knowledge that will differ from that which exists today, the inauguration of an unmediated communications space, a profound renewal of human relations, both within the context of work and within political life, a reinvention of democracy--all possibilities that are embodied in the ideal of the collective intellect. [105] {fluidiom}
*The collective intellect is a kind of corporation in which each shareholder supplies as capital his knowledge, experience, and his ability to learn and teach. [105]
*The intelligent collective neither submits to nor limits individual intelligences, but on the contrary exalts them, fructifies and reinvigorates them. [105]
*This transpersonal subject is not merely the sum of individual intelligences. [105]
*Rather, it gives rise to a qualitatively different form of intelligence, which is added to personal intelligences, forming a kind of collective brain, or hypercortex. [105] {fluidiom}
*As we have seen, according to medieval philosophy, man's intelligence only becomes active intermittently [106]
*God, however, is eternally active thought because He always realizes, outside time, the perfect unity of the intellect, the intelligible, and intellection. [106]
*To better understand the difference between divine and human thought, we will first distinguish the three terms: the intelligible, the intellect, and intellection. [106]
*That which is intelligible are the forms or ideas of things. [106]
*But to the extent that they inform things, ideas are only potential. [106]
*They do not become active, or fully become ideas, until they are perceived by an intellect. [106]
*The intellect is the ability to comprehend or perceive ideas, a characteristic of intelligent beings. [106]
*As long as it perceives forms, the intellect remains a potential. [106]
*It only becomes active when it identifies with the ideas that it embraces, by becoming one with them. [106]
*Intellection is the becoming-idea of the intellect, the movement that realizes the union of the intellect and the intelligible. [106]
*It is through intellection that the intelligent being passes from potentiality to act, and thus reunites with its essence. [106]
*In accomplishing this act the intelligent being is united with his intellect and thus, at the same time, with the intelligible form comprised by the intellect. [106]
*Each time there is an active thought, the intellect, the intelligent, and the intelligible become one and the same. [106]
*Why is man not always actively intelligent and thus united to his essence? Because mankind's intellect is not in a continual state of operation: It sleeps, dreams, grows tired, sick, etc. [106]
*It is necessary the he proceed successively from the intellection of one idea to that of another. [107]
*This inevitably results in discontinuities, breaks, which are exacerbated to the external world. [107]
*At the moment when our intellect leaps from one perception to another, intellection is interrupted and separated from its own essence. [107]
*God alone can contemplate a single idea since that idea is the source of all the others. [107]
*This occurs without any sense of discontinuity because He is that idea. [107]
*Being incorporeal, God never sleeps, never tires, is never immersed in sensation or passion. [107]
*As pure idea from which all ideas emanate, He contemplates himself through the motionless movement of endless intellection. [107]
*He contemplates himself through the motionless movement of endless intellection. [107]
*His essence is to be eternally intellect, intelligible, and intelligent. [107]
*While the thought of individuals is discontinuous because they sleep, grow ill, tired, or take vacations, the collective intellect is always alert. [107]
*When a mind slips into sleep, a hundred others rise up to take its place. [107]
*Consequently, the virtual world is always illuminated, animated by the flames of living intelligences. [107]
*By combining thousands of intermittent flickering rays, we obtain a collective light that shines continuously. [107]
*I could be wrong to compare this process to some simple mental "changing of the guard", a summation of consciousnesses. [107]
*No, this is the expression of a collective intelligence. [107]
*For when I sleep, my angel continues to act in the virtual world. [107]
*My angel. [107]
*This is the expression I wish to give to y memory, my knowledge, y navigations, my desire to learn, my hierarchy of interests, the relationships I have with the other members of the thinking community. [107]
*This angel, my digital messenger, helps inform, orient, and continuously evaluate the virtual world, which is itself the expression of all messengers. [108] {gossip}
*These landscapes will be mapped and divided into interactive spaces by new sign systems, dynamic diagrams and ideograms, moving architectures of images. [108] {fluidiom}
*Computer hardware and software will make these universes of signification sensible, explorable, and interactive. [108] {fluidiom}
*Collective intelligence realizes its reintegration. [108]
*It constructs transpersonal but continuous thought. [108] {fluidiom} {gossip}
*An anonymous cogitation but one that is perpetually alive, uniformly irrigated, metamorphic. [108] {fluidiom}
*Through the intermediary of virtual worlds, we can not only exchange information but think together, share our memories and our plans to produce a cooperative brain. [108] {fluidiom}
*Media continuity is merely physical. [109]
*It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for intellectual continuity. [109]
====The Sensible and the Intelligible [109]====
*Translation from one language or discipline to another, enables disconnected thought spaces to communicate with one another. [109]
*But conventional writing is by nature a system of static and discontinuous traces. [109]
*It is an inert body, fragmented, dispersed, ever growing, whose consolidation and animation require of each individual a lengthy process of research, interpretation, and association. [109]
*To remedy this situation, the virtual worlds of collective intelligence will develop new forms of writing: animated pictograms, cinelanguages that will retain the trace of interactions of their navigators. [109]
*Collective memory will organize and redeploy itself for each navigator on the basis of his interests and travels in the virtual world. [109] {fluidiom}
*The new, angelic space of signs will be sensible, active, intelligent, and at the service of explorers. [109] {fluidiom}
*What is interpretation? [109]
*The subtle mind attempting to coax the inert body of the letter into graceful motion. [109]
*The evocation of an author's breath in the presence of dead signs. [109]
*The dangerous reconstruction of the know of affects and images from which the text arises. [109]
*But if the signs are alive? [110]
*If the text-image or thought-space grows, proliferates, and metamorphoses continuously, following the rhythm of the collective intelligence? [110] {fluidiom}
*If the lead characters make room for the very substance of the angels. [110]
*If the opaque and gigantic satisfaction of texts effaces itself before a fluid and continuous medium whose explorer always occupies the center. [110] {seems to me this is the essence or definition of fluidiom}
*As we have shown, every thought, even the most abstract, is based to some extent on the presence of an image. [110]
*Of course, the image is not used exclusively to improve understanding; it fascinates, seduces, and deceives as well. [110]
*It is as if the sensible were the prize in confused and inconclusive struggle: instrument of knowledge, playing field for the intelligence, or black hole of the mind? [110]
*The more the intelligible is understood in terms of the sensible, the more the sign-image increases in scope and complexity, and the shorter becomes the distance between man and God. [111]
*Stimulating the human mind, the new agent intellect is defined as a machine to make thought visible, to image abstraction and complexity, creating a landscape that our angelic bodies can explore, feel, and modify. [111] {fluidiom}
*The virtual world makes interconnected relation apparent, enables us to touch the most obscure notions; it illuminates images, makes them comprehensible. [111] {fluidiom}
*It is the most appropriate environment for the flowering and development of the visual11 languages that will weave together the intelligence, or, rather, the collective imagination. [111] {fluidiom}
*Within the theological framework man receives his ideas from the outside, whereas God contemplates Himself. [111]
*It is true that on a human scale, intelligence is the gateway to what is external, perpetual unfulfillment, an effort to reach the outside and that which is not self. [111]
*When we learn, we enter the world of the other. [111] {just like in fluidiom meme spaces can fly through each other}
*But while learning, that is, while transforming himself, the thinking subject strives continuously to bring the stranger to him, to transform the other into self, so that foreignness can no longer be grasped in itself and we must again clear a path to the outside. [111]
*It is at the same time a society of animated signs, a shared organ of perception, cooperative memory, and space for communication and navigation. [112]
*Just as writing or the telephone did not prevent people from continuing to meet in person, the virtual worlds of collective intellect cannot substitute for direct human contact. [111] {human contact is (still) the only way to perceive genuine human emotions (or body language); also see How the mind works, from Steven Pinker}
====The Three Freedoms [113]====
*We know that God is his own cause. But what is a cause? [113]
*According to Aristotelian philosophy, there are four types of cause: if, for example, we take a vase made by a potter, the clay is its material cause, the potter its efficient cause, the shape initially conceived by the potter its formal cause, and the property of containing liquid its final cause. [113]
*God obviously has no material cause. [113]
*As for the rest, God is final, efficient, and formal cause in and of Himself, which is why he is absolutely free. [113]
*A human being unfortunately does not have this possibility: His parents are his efficient cause, God (or other biological evolution) his formal cause, and he can't always become and end for himself. [113]
*But since naked and solitary man is unable to do so, why not attempt to form collective intellects capable of achieving such divine freedom? [113] {tower of Babel?}
*The collective intellect is its own final cause. [113]
*It has no goal other than to grow, develop, differentiate itself, and propagate the varieties of signs that populate it, the cosmic diversity that it envelops, and the ontological plurality that is its richness and its life. [113]
*To do so, it must obviously maintain its existence and thus respect certain economic, technical, and other constraints. [113]
*The collective intellect is as much as possible its own efficient cause. [113]
*It is born from the will of its members and not from some outside impulse. [113]
*In a sense, therefore, it must already exist before it can come into being (since it is composed of "its members"). [114]
*This paradox of creative circularity is inherent in all automatic or autopoietic production. [114]
*The ability of the collective intellect to become its own formal cause is its greatest achievement, the touchstone of its immanence. [114]
*I would even say that its final cause is its own existence, that is, its existence as self-cause, in the sense that we have just defined. [114]
*But if its members succeed in maintaining the autonomy of the collective intellect, each increase in qualitative diversity strengthens the interest of everyone in its continued existence. [115] {team}
*And the more its members are involved in its permanent re-creation, the more the immanent dynamic of expression will favor the proliferation of ways of being. [115] {increasing returns}
*Each mode of freedom will be reflected upon the others in a positive spiral. [115] {increasing returns}
*In this way collective intellect creates a new space. [115]

===The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace: The Aesthetics of Collective Intelligence [117]===
====Cyberspace Under Construction [117]====
*These [knowledge navigators] would include, in no particular order: hypertext, the World Wide Web…neuro-mimetic programs, artificial life, expert systems, etc. [118]
*While the true "great works" remain to be accomplished within the universe of the digital information and the new sites for the emergence of collective intelligence, we continue to encumber the landscape with cement, glass and steel. [119]
*We have built pyramids when we are in the process of again becoming nomads, when architecture for a new exodus is needed. [119] {fluidiom}
*Cyberspace: urban nomad, software engineering, the liquid architecture of the knowledge space. [119] {fluidiom}
*It brings with it methods of collective perception, feeling, remembrance, working, playing and being. [119] {fluidiom}
*It is an interior architecture, an unfinished system of intelligence hardware, a gyrating city with its rooftops of signs. [119]
*The development of cyberspace, the quintessential medium of communication and thought, is one of the principal aesthetic and political challenges of the coming century. [119]
====From Design to Implementation [121]====
*With respect to its relationship to future projects, cyberspace will assume the form of cultural attractor, which we can summarize as follows.
*1. …messages will now revolve around the individual receiver. [121]
*2. The distinction between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpreters will blend to form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from machine and network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activity of the others (dissolution of the signature). [121]
*3. The distinction between the message and the work of art, envisaged as a microterritory attributed to an author is fading. [121]
*Rather than distribute a message to recipients who are outside the process of creation and invited to give meaning to a work of art belatedly, the artist now attempts to construct an environment a system of communication and production, a collective event that implies its recipients, transforms interpreters into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop with collective action. [123] {fluidiom}
*Clearly the "open work" prefigures such an arrangement. [123]
*But the art of implication doesn't constitute a work of art at all, even one that is open or indefinite. [123]
*It brings forth a process, attempts to open a career to autonomous lives, provides an introduction to the growth and habitation of a world. [123]
*It places us within a creative cycle, a living environment of which we are already the coauthors. [123]
*The accent has now shifted from work to progress. [123]
*Its embodiment is manifested in moments, places, collective dynamic, but no longer in individuals. [123]
*It is an art without signature. [123]
*Each of us in our own way, as soon as we express ourselves, produces, reproduces, and alters language. [123]
*From singular utterances to creative listening, languages emerge and drift along the stream of communication, borne by thousands of voices that call and respond to one another, take risks, provoke and deceive, hurling words, expressions and new accents across the abyss of non-sense. [124]
*In this way and artist can appropriate an expression inherited from earlier generations and help it evolve. [124]
*This is one of the primary social functions of art: participation in the continuous invention of the languages and signs of a community. [124]
*But the creator of language is always a community. [124]
====For an Architecture of Deterritorialization [126]====
*The artists who explore such alternatives may be the pathfinders of new architecture of cyberspace, which will undoubtedly become one of the major arts of the twenty-first century. [126] {fluidiom}
*The new architects could just as easily be engineers, network or interface designers, software programmers, international standards organizations, information lawyers, etc., as individuals with a traditional form of art. [126] {fluidiom}
*In this field, the most obviously "technical" choices will have considerable political, economic, and cultural impact. [126]
*To guide the construction of cyberspace, to help us choose among the different possible orientations or even imagine new ones, some criteria of ethical and political selection are needed, an organizing vision. [126]
*Means that contribute to the production of a collective intelligence or imagination should be encouraged. [126]
*In keeping with this general principal, I would suggest that we concentrate on the following: [126]
*1. Instruments that promote the development of the social bond through apprenticeship and the exchange of knowledge. [127]
*2. Methods of communication that are predisposed to acknowledge, integrate, and restore diversity rather than simply reproduce traditional media-driven forms of distribution. [127]
*3. Systems that promote the emergence of autonomous beings, regardless of the nature of the systems (pedagogical, artistic, etc.) or the beings involved (individuals, groups, works of art, artificial creatures). [127]
*4. Semiotic engineering that will enable us to exploit and enhance, for the benefit of the greatest number, the veins of data, the capital of skills, and symbolic power accumulated by humanity. [127]
*technicians have a great deal to learn from humanists in this area. [127]

==The Knowledge Space [128]==

===The Four Spaces===
====The Earth [131]====
*The earth is not a planet, not even a biosphere, but a cosmos in which humanity communicates with animals, plants, landscapes, locales and spirits.
*The earth is the spaces in which mankind, the stones, vegetables, beasts, and gods meet, talk, come together, and separate in a process of unending re-creation. [132]
*Mankind does not live within a niche, as a dog does, because it can gaze at the stars, invent the gods that fashioned it, adopt eagles and leopards as its ancestors, and live among its signs, its tales, and its deeds. [132]
*Man is the only animal that lives in the cosmos that does not simply belong to a species but chooses its totems. [132]
*Humanity is the species dedicated to the earth, to the cosmos of animals and plants in communication, to the chaosmos of metamorphoses. [132]
====Territory [133]====
*For the past twelve thousand years, a second anthropological space, the territorial space, has been spreading across the earth in ever expanding sheets, isolated patches that have slowly come together over the centuries. [133]
*With the earth, the territory establishes a predatory and destructive relationship; it dominates, confines, encloses, inscribes, and measures it. [134]
====The Commodity Space [135]====
*Or did the commodity space come into being in the eighteenth century, amid the smoke of the industrial revolutions? [135]
*This was not the customary space of exchange or commerce, but a new world built from the incessant circulation of money in an ever tightening, ever quickening loop. [135]
*But in the wake of an extraordinary historical conjunction, a collective revery or desire that was already beginning to escape territorial sp ace, in search of another space, other velocities. [135]
*This new world succeeded in enlarging itself, living off its own life. [136]
*Crossing borders, upsetting territorial hierarchies, the dance of money brought its wake an accelerated movement, a rising tides of objects, signs, and individuals. [136]
*The commodity space was smoothed out, maintained, and enlarged by a deterritorializing machine, which suddenly sprang into being, feeding on everything in its path. [136]
*Just as King Midas transformed whatever he touched into gold, capitalism transmutes into merchandise everything it draws into its orbit. [136]
*When the commodity space assumes its autonomy within the territory, it doesn't simply abolish the preceding spaces, but subordinates them, organizes them in terms of its own objectives. [137]
*Capitalism is deterritorializing and, for the past three centuries, industry and commerce have been the principal engines driving the evolution of human societies. [137]
*Capitalism is irreversible. [137]
*It is economy and has made economy the permanent dimension of human existence. [137]
*There will always be a commodity space, as there will always be an earth and territorial space. [137]
*Weaving back and forth in its dizzying ascension, the mantle of commodity, the sky of contemporary humanity, tears open to reveal another space. [138]
====The Knowledge Space [138]====
*The knowledge space doesn't exist. [138]
*Etymologically, it is a u-topia, no-place. [138]
*It is embodied nowhere. [138]
*But it is not realized, it is already virtual, waiting to be born. [138]
*It emerges is patches, traces, just below the surface. [138]
*It flickers even before it has had a chance to develop its own autonomy, its irreversibility. [138]
*This crystallization of a free knowledge space, the creation of a new anthropological dimension, the passage from a point of no return, may never take place. [138]
*What is knowledge? [139]
*Each time a human being organizes or reorganizes his relationship to himself or his peers, to things, signs, or the cosmos, he is engaged in a form of knowledge, apprenticeship. [139]
*Knowledge, in the sense I am using he term, is a knowledge of living, a living-in-knowledge, one that is coextensive with life. [139]
*It is part of a cosmopolitan and borderless space of relations and qualities, a space for the metamorphosis of relationships and the emergence of ways of being, a space in which the processes of individual and collective subjectivization come together. [139]
*The knowledge space is the plane of composition, recomposition, communication, and singularization, where thought triggers thought in a continual process. [139]
*The knowledge space has always existed. [139]
*Noolithic: stone age of the mind. The stone is no longer silex but the silicon of microprocessors and fiber optic cable. [140]
*This fourth anthropological space, should it come into fruition, will harbor forms of self-organization and sociability that tend toward the production of subjectivity. [141]
*The intention of collective intellect is not to destroy the earth, or the territory, or the market economy. [141]
*On the contrary, the long-term existence of the first three spaces--survival--is without doubt conditioned by the resurgence of a new plane of existence for humanity. [141]

===Anthropological Space [143]===
====The Multiple Spaces of Signification [143]====
*Our interactions produce, transform and continuously develop heterogeneous and interlinked spaces. [143]
*A simple conversation could be seen as the shared construction of a virtual space of significance, which each speaker attempts to shape according to his mood and intentions. [143]
*These plastic spaces, [143]
*Lived spaces are relativistic. [143]
*They bend and shape themselves around objects they contain and which organize them. [143]
*The extent to which people, images, words and concepts are capable of structuring a space of signification depends on the affective force associated with them. [143]
*Evanescent spaces, like small bubbles that are form when two people meet and then disappear [143]
*We recognize the importance of a event within the intellectual, technical, social, or historical sphere by its ability to reorganize the proximities and distances in a given space, its ability to create new space-times(s), new proximity systems. [144]
*Human beings do not inhabit only a physical or geometric space, they simultaneously live in emotional, aesthetic, social, and historical spaces, spaces of signification in general. [144]
*The people standing around me on the subway are more distant, within affective space, than my daughter or father, who are three hundred miles away. [144]
*We live in thousands of different spaces, each with its own system of proximity (temporal, emotional, linguistic, etc.), such that a given entity can be near us in one space, yet quite distant in another. [144]
*Each space has its own axiology, its own system of values for measurement. [144]
*We spend our time modifying and improving the spaces in which we live, in connecting and separating them, articulating and solidifying them, introducing new objects, displacing the forces that structure them, jumping from one space to another. [145]
====Anthropological Spaces are Structuring, Living, Autonomous, and Irreversible [145]====
*The knowledge space didn't begin to shape itself with any degree of consistency until the twentieth century. [146]
*It is not some kind of abstract container for all possible knowledge. [146]
*On the contrary, it harbors a specific kind of knowledge and reorganizes, hierarchizes, and submerges within the active environment it comprises, modes of knowledge from the other anthropological spaces. [146]
====Anthropological Spaces are Planes of Existence, Contingent and Eternal Velocities [147]====
*Languages and narratives on earth, fields and clay tablets for the territory, printed matter and machines in the commodity space, digital networks, virtual universes, and artificial life in the knowledge space. [147]
*Anthropological spaces in themselves are neither infrastructures nor superstructures but planes of existence, frequencies, velocities, determined within the social spectrum. [147]
*Suddenly, humanity finds itself moving at a greater speed. [147]
*And this new speed brings a new space into being. [147]
*The earth provides the fundamental frequency. [147]
*The first space corresponds to the introduction of velocities exceeding those of animal life: the velocity of language, technology, and culture. [147]
*The territorial space introduces the first velocity perceptible at the individual level, that of writing and empire, bureaucracy and borders: torpor, the extended time of the territory. [148]
*With capitalism comes acceleration. [148]
*The knowledge space itself develops within the limits of real time, on the other side of "live". [148]
*These four velocities, these four frequencies, coexist. [148]
*And although the knowledge spaces appears along the horizon of thousands of projects, thousands of currents of contemporary society, although its formation is in my opinion eminently desirable, it may never achieve autonomy. [148]
*Thus the anthropological spaces are contingent. [148]
*And yet, once they take shape, even virtually, they become eternal, timeless, as if they had always already been there. [148]
*Is economy as a discipline anything more that the flattened, analytic form of the eternity of capital? [149]
*Humanity crosses the four spaces with its entire being: walking, its feet strike the great earth of myth, its hair rising to the cosmos and the gods; sitting, composed, it is inscribed on the territory; its arms work the commodity space, eyes and ears devouring the signs of the spectacle; its head represents the knowledge space, a brain connected to other brains, secreting the virtual worlds of collective intellect, wandering, navigating, re-creating a thousand other earths upon the pluralized sphere of artifice. [149] {fluidiom: data mining man work of art}
*Anthropological cartography is a checklist, a substrate of memory, a tool to help deploy every dimension of a being or process. [150]
*To gain some idea of the complexity involved in such an undertaking, imagine a notebook containing four pages (each page corresponding to an anthropological space) that have been torn, crumpled and rolled into a ball. Now suppose that a needle (representing the phenomenon to be mapped according to our projection system) is stuck into this ball of paper. The needle will pierce the same space several times. Each new needle stuck in the ball will intersect the four spaces differently, both in terms of the order and the number of times it enters them. [150]
*Shredded, torn, crumpled, pierced with hoe, inextricably folded within one another, earth, the territory, capital, and the virtual space of knowledge coexist everywhere differently. [150]

===Identity [151]===
*Each space corresponds to a separate identity, a style of desire, a physical structure. [151]
*There are terrestrial and territorial affects, commodity and knowledge affects. [151]
====Microcosm, Micropolis, and the Small House [151]====
*On earth, names, tattoos, blazons, totems, and masks are all signs that signify identity. [151]
*The definition of an individual by his participation in the clan, the blood line, the very ancient system of descendance and alliance, dates from the period of the great prehistoric earth. [151]
*The being is formed by a network of cosmic relations that define him and determine his status. [151]
*Exteriority becomes interiority: situated in the universe, the individual is a microcosm, an echo, a reflection of the whole. [151]
*Each part of his body, each movement of his soul, reflects events or places that exist in the world. [152]
*The Neolithic revolution provided a means by which individuals were attached to the soil and their existence recorded by the state, a mechanism that exists to this day. [152]
*Our relationship to territory, notably by means of landed property and its multiple avatars, defines the place of the individual in society, his identity. [152]
*But territorial identity is not limited to geography alone. [152]
*It involves position and rank in institutions, castes, hierarchies, civil service corps (teachers, mining engineers), orders (doctors, architects, the nobility or clergy), disciplines (paleontology, sociology), everything that organizes a space in terms of borders, ranks and levels. [152]
*The identity provided by a diploma, for example, combining both rank and discipline, is obviously a component of the territory and not the knowledge space. [152]
*The psychology of the territory is a hypostasized image of the social order. [153]
*The commodity space deterritorializes and destructures the older frameworks of sociability and identity. [153]
*Individuals are redefined according to their role in the fabrication, circulation, and consumption of goods, information, and images. [153]
*Within the commodity space the signs of identity are quantified: income, salary, bank accounts, "external signs of wealth". [153]
*We could say, to use an outdated terminology that identity depends on where we fall within the system of production and our position within the circuits of consumption and exchange. [153]
*In a world dominated by economy, the individual is no longer a microcosm or a micropolis, but a micro o√Økos. [153]
*The word "economy" is derived, by way of Latin, from the Greek o√Økos, house, and nomia, administration. [153]
*Identity is constructed through the relationship between parents and children, by means of an Oedipal triangulation. [153]
====Toward a Sapient Identity, or Polycosmos [154]====
*The emergence of a reality organized around knowledge can provoke a profound crisis of identity in which the older principles of self-orientation and identification in terms of a community lose their effectiveness. [154]
*What concepts, what methods are needed to reveal the knowledge space, and, at the same time, our individual identity within it? [154]
*One possible direction is suggested by the cosmopedia2 and the use of knowledge trees3. [154]
*Collective intellects emerge, interconnect, move, and change. [154]
*It is through the circulation, association, and metamorphosis of thinking communities that the knowledge space is born and perpetuated. [154]
*Each collective intellect harbors a virtual world that expresses the relations it maintains, the problems that activate it, the images it shapes from its environment, its memory, its knowledge in general. [154]
*Members of the collective intellect coproduce, develop, and continuously modify the virtual world that expresses their community: the collective intellect is always learning, always inventing. [154]
*A video game plunges the player into an imaginary territory, while the virtual world of collective intellect serves as a map, an instrument of location and orientation that refers to a real space, the most intensely real space we currently have, the space of living knowledge. [155]
*Since he participates in more that one collective intellect, he creates several knowledge blazons. [156] [The blazon is the image of an individual's apprenticeship (curriculum) as it appears on the knowledge tree of a community. See Les Arbres de connaisances, op. cit.)
*On earth, man is a micro cosmos, within territorial space, he is a micro polis, within commodity space, he has become a micro o√Økos, a small house, and within knowledge space, humanity is eve more restricted: He is nothing more than a brain. [156]
*Even his body becomes a cognitive system. [156]
*But the brain shapes itself collectively, makes contact with other brains, with systems of signs, language and intellectual technologies, it participates in thinking communities that explore and create multiple worlds. [156]
*Thus the brain of Homo sapiens sapiens turns in upon itself, unveils its obverse and transforms itself into a polycosm. [156] {fluidiom}
*Within the knowledge space, humanity becomes nomadic once again, pluralizes its identity, explores heterogeneous worlds, is itself heterogeneous and multiple, in the process of becoming, thinking. [156]
====Quantum Identities [156]====
*Is there a quantum mechanics of freedom? [157]
*Can we measure subjectivity? [157]
*The quanta of human qualities will be signs, and nothing more than signs. [157]
*Technically, the individual will be able to express himself by distributing dynamic ideograms throughout an indefinite number of virtual worlds. [160] {fluidiom}
*The economy of human qualities must provide an alternative to subjectivization by inclusion. [160]
*It can do this by allowing individuals to freely project an unlimited number of images of themselves throughout an unrestricted variety of collective spaces. [160]
*Thus each one of us will be able to invent our identities (our dances, our roles) by sharing in the construction of a large number of communities (balls, plays). [160]
*The individual becomes a molecular vector of collective intelligence, multiplying his active surfaces, complicating his interfaces, circulating among different communities, simultaneously enriching both his own identity and theirs. [160]
====Coexistence of the Four Identities [160]====
*Each of us possesses four types of identity, even though the first may be forgotten, even though the last has yet to make its appearance. [160]
*We are born and grow up within all four spaces simultaneously. [160]
*Our birth is not simply territorial (an entry in a list of records) and familial. [160]
*We are also born by and for the earth, and through our birth we inaugurate a cosmic existence. [160]
*But it is clear that the solutions to a number of our contemporary psychological, social, and cultural problems will be found in the discovery or rediscovery of other spaces. [161]
*We must learn to displace our identities, our affects, our vital forces toward the earth, rediscover our relationship to the cosmos. [161] {Joy}
*An identity made whole will cross the four spaces. [161]

=== Semiotics [163]===
====Semiotics of the Earth: Presence [163]====
*On earth the universe of signification reflects the reign of power and presence. [164]
*Along the uniform space of the great nomadic earth, beings signs, and things interconnect as rhizomes, exchange places, weave an unbroken canvas of meaning. [164] {fluidiom}
*This is the semiotic environment of primitives, animists, preliterate cultures, and very young children, characteristic of the unconscious and "primary processes". [164]
====The Semiotic of Territory: Division [164]====
*The separations and borders that divide territory insinuate themselves into the very heart of the relations of signification: Semiotic division becomes institutionalized. [165]
====The Semiotic of Merchandise: Illusion [166]====
*Within the commodity space, it is no longer only speech that is cut off from life. [166]
*Scenes and faces, landscapes and music, rites and spectacles, events of all kinds are indefinitely reproduced and distributed through books, newspapers, photographs, records, film, radio, tapes, and television, cut off from their context of emergence. [166]
*Multiplies by the media swept along thousands of pathways and channels, the sign becomes deterritorialized. [166]
*The great sign mall, the spectacle, thus becomes a kind of superreality through which every utterance, every image has to pass before it can become effective. [167]
*The sign's passage through media channels dethrones representation. "As seen on television" [167]
====The Knowledge Space: Semiotic Productivity [168]====
*The semiotic of the knowledge space is defined by the return of being, of real and living existence within the sphere of signification. [168]
*This escape from the world of absence, this resumption of contact with reality should obviously not be understood as a process of objectivization or relation tied to a given signified, a guaranty of signs by means of transcendence. [168]
*The art of the future will no longer force signs but post-media methods of communication. [169] {fluidiom}
*Coupled to sensorimotor, plastic, interactive, and multidimensional control systems, the images escapes the destiny of fascination traced for it by merchandise and becomes an instrument of watchfulness, knowledge, and invention more powerful than text. [170] {fluidiom}

=== Figures of Space and Time [173]===
====Earth: Immemorial Footprints [173]====
*The earth is mankind's memory, its landscape the map of mankind's epics, the storehouse of his knowledge. [173]
====Territory: Closure, Inscription, History [174]====
*Every time we build something, in the sense of engineering and architecture, in the sense of building for the long term we extend the empire of the territory. [174]
*Customs, counters, gates, locks constantly reestablish what is in and what is out. [176]
*Among the scribes, exams and competitions create barriers around knowledge. [176]
*There is a before and after only because there is an inside and an outside. [177]
====Commodity: Circuits, Real-Time [177]====
*The commodity space lives entirely within its circuits: on the highway or train, not on the landscape we cross, in the airplane, not in the village near the airport. [178]
*The individual links of the network continue to circulate in other networks: the television in our pocket, the headphones on our ears, the laptop in its case, the portable fax machine, the mobile phone. [178]
*Objects in motion within objects in motion combine their velocities, exchange messages, intersect a moving, realistic space, in which everything moves in relation to everything else, where distance means nothing and speed everything. [178]
*On the horizon of acceleration, in the eye of the hurricane of speed, real time, motionless, drives the space-time of commodity. [179]
*Real time is the reality of commodity time, its entelechy, its ideal: a time that is no longer sequential but parallel, no longer linear but instantaneous, the time of simultaneity, the limit of acceleration. [179]
*The most advanced form of real time occurs within organizations. [179]
*From flexible manufacturing systems to groupware, digital networks have brought about the dematerialization of organizational structure. [179]
*The ultimate deterritorialization: organization charts, production procedures, and administrative architectures are transferred to software and thereby mobilized and tamed. [179]
*The virtual enterprise adapts in real time tot the transformation of the market. [179]
*In this sense it is similar to the knowledge space. [179]
*But we can't get there by simply going faster. We need some sort of quantitative leap. [179]
*Different velocities, different intensities will animate intellects. [179]
====Knowledge: Subjective Time, Interior Space [179]====
*The knowledge space annuls deferral by changing the reference system: It is nourished in internal time. [180]
*In the concept of the knowledge tree6, for example, it is the curricula of individual apprenticeship that structure the knowledge tree of the community. [181]
*Yet these curricula are not synchronized with calendar time; the dates on which we obtain our diplomas are not shown. [181]
*An individual's cognitive blazons, projections of their curricula on the tree, no longer record a sequence of personal achievement, but individual abilities in an emerging collective order, that of the community tree, and thus enables individuals to orient themselves in terms of a specific situation, a context shared by all the other members of the collective intellect. [181]
====The Emerging Knowledge Space [182]====
*The collective intellect reverses the relationship between time and space that had been established by the territory. [182]
*The collective intellect, however, acts against the grain of territory since it transforms time into space. [182]
*The territory attempts to maintain borders, hierarchies, and structures. [183]
*The knowledge space on the other hand is always in an emergent state. [183]
*It is never structures a priori, but expresses, maps, makes visible the strands of subjective and necessary unforeseeable durations. [183] {see book for suggestions of appropriate brand names for accompanying software to be developed}
*The communities of intelligence flee the territory, escape the network of commodity for a knowledge space that they produce by thinking, dreaming, and wandering. [183]

===Navigational Instruments [185]===
====Earth: Narratives, Portolans, Algorithms [185]====
*The compass is a terrestrial device. [186]
*On earth, the principal instrument of knowledge is the narrative. [186]
*The abstract structure of the story is the algorithm: the description of a series of actions that occur in a certain order from a starting point to an end point. [186]
====Territory: Projection Systems [187]====
*Based on the time, the day, the astronomical tables, he could determine latitude. This is referred to as taking one's bearings. [187]
*This bearing is no longer an individual point, a landmark, a sign, a color of the water, a whirlpool, a mark on the earth-sea, but an abstract point, the projection on the surface of the earth of celestial coordinates. [187]
*A position in territorial space. [187]
*Each point on the map would now be indexed to the sky, pinned in place by the sphere of fixed stars. [188]
*In the new space the earth is divided up, enclosed in a net that falls from the heavens. [188]
*Each point is assigned a set of coordinates, an address, even though it remains unnamed. [188]
*The nomadic earth immobilized by the sky. [189]
====Commodity: Statistics and Probabilities [189]====
*In the commodity space there is no longer any possibility of fixing positions--beings, signs, or things--within a system. [189]
*Everything is in circulation; everything is in a stat of continuous flux. [189]
*They [the statistics] were used to draw up the moving maps of the commodity space. [189]
*But indispensable as these instruments are, in the absence of other means of orientation in the commodity space, they quickly reveal their drawbacks. [190]
*Individualities are no longer fixed by a system, as territorial space, but lumped together in a single mass. [190]
*The statistical profile masks individual features. [190]
*Processes are equated with molar equilibria, with states. [190]
*Qualities are reduced to quantities. [190]
====Knowledge: Cinemaps [190] {fluidiom}====
*Yet knowledge is born, runs, and dies at an even faster pace than commodities. [190]
*The main problem in the knowledge space is to organize the organizing, objectivize the subjectivizing. [190]
*Knowledge about knowledge is based on an essential circularity, one that is primordial, ineluctable. [190]
*Our understanding of understanding is ipso facto a transformation of knowledge, a perpetual deviation, a dynamic reorientation that is continuously reactivated and reevaluated. [190]
*The cartography of knowledge space cannot be based on statistics, which are purely quantitative. [191]
*Together wit Michel Authier, I have suggested a new type of orientation and navigation, especially designed for the knowledge space, which we refer to as a cinemap. [191] {fluidiom}
*A collective intellect navigates within a moving informational universe: A cinemap is the product of this interaction. [191] {fluidiom}
*Each object or group of objects in the universe under construction can be visualized on the cinemap. [191]
*We can measure the distances between these objects, or between an object and an attribute it doesn't yet possess, for example. [191]
*But since the cinemap expresses the relations among informational objects, it evolves and restructures itself at the same time as the actors modify themselves and new actors and new attributes appear. [192]
*Each member of the collective intellect can find his individual location on the cinemap. [192]
*In this case two possibilities present themselves. [192]
*In the first case the informational universe models the collective intellect itself, the diversity of its attributes, its behavior. [192]
*Here the individual is one of the object-actors who help structure the cinemap. [192]
*Obviously the individual can find his position on the map. [192]
*He is indexed by a constellation of icons. [192]
*His signature appears on the cinemap of the collective. [192]
*In the second, the object-actors of the informational universe do not model the members of the collective intellect but other data. [192]
*Here, individuals are still recorded on the cinemap according to their preferences, their interests, their relationship to the objects of the informational universe. [192]
*Their position on the cinemap, indirectly assigned this time, can again be visualized by a distribution of attributes, a configuration of sign-points. [192]
*By using a cinemap a group can shape itself into a collective intellect. [193]
*2001: the Odyssey of Knowledge. [193]

===Objects of Knowledge [195]===
*Within each anthropological space {aspace}, the most important objects of knowledge are the figures specific to that space. [195]
====The Object of Earth: The Eternal Becoming-Beginning [195]====
*On earth the object of the story is an origin. [195]
*But its stories are transmitted, perpetuated, related in cycles, varied. [195]
====The Object of Territory: Geometry [196]====
*The object of the territory is the measured earth, divided into sectors: geo-metry. [196]
====The Commodity Object: Flux, Fire, Crowds [197]====
*The characteristic object of the third space is obviously the production and consumption of commodities. [197]
*Economy is in some sense the geometry or cartography of the space opened up by generalized commodity exchange. [197]
*The objects of the commodity space are not only those of economy, but also everything that is distributed, flows, circulates, is transformed and perishes, everything that feeds its machinery and streams through its channels. [197] {fluidiom}
*It was in response to this sense of movement and exchange that thermodynamics, the science of the transformation of energy, was born in the nineteenth century, amidst the fire and steam of the industrial revolution. [197]
*For both the mathematical theory of information and cybernetics, the quantity of information carried by a message is inversely proportional to the probability of appearance of that message3 {Shannon}. [198]
*According to this definition, the quantity of information will be maximized if the message is completely random--which obviously clashes with common sense--and the quantity of information will approach zero if the message is highly redundant, if it contributes little to reducing our uncertainty about the state of the reference universe. [198]
*The information that is "sensed" is thus situated, the majority of the time, "between crystal and smoke", that is, between redundant order and chaos. [198]
*Information is apprehended by means of the mathematical instruments created by thermodynamics, ultimately, statistics and probability. [198]
*Much has been written about the analogy between noise in information theory, which corrodes, disorganizes, and punctures messages, and entropy in thermodynamics, which blurs distinctions and minimizes tension. [198] {fluidiom & tensegrity}
*Since noise not only destroys messages but also creates new information, the transition between energy and information provides the key to reversing organizational disorder, one of the mechanisms of self-organization. [198] {Kauffman}
*These speculations followed the economic changes that have been taking place since the end of the Second World War: Communication networks control the distribution of energy, the management of signs controls the production of material goods. [198]
*As the anthropological space of networks and deterritorialized acceleration continues to grow, physics becomes increasingly preoccupied with processes rather than laws, disequilibrium rather than states. [199]
====The Object of the Knowledge Space: Signification and Freedom [199]====
*Collective intellects are human communities in the act of self-communication and self-reflection, involved in the permanent negotiation of relations and contexts of shared signification. [199]
*In The Technologies of Intelligence, I suggested that the scope of the cognitive sciences be expanded and outlined a program of "cognitive ecology". [200]
*The system for the production and distribution of knowledge doesn't depend on the individual features of the human cognitive system alone, but also on collective methods of organization and the instruments with which information is communicated and processed. [200]
*Thus, cognitive ecology would focus on studying the interactions between the biological, social, and technical determinants of understanding. [200]
*It refers less to the way in which a sign refers to an object than to the relationship between an event and a context. [201]
*They are part of a contrived time, one that is moving, scattered with singularities, one that fashions the fabric of our lives. [201]
*Evaluation. Evaluation provides the human landscape with its sense of variation and difference. [201]
*Structure. Structural analysis only provides insights into static aspects of the paradigm. [202]
*Moreover, such structures are generally constructed manually, following some lengthy, and often questionable, effort of interpretation. [203]
*Structure is a modality of the system. [203]
*Structuralism is therefore an instrument of knowledge characteristic of territorial space, manipulated by professional interpreters, who distribute its objects in accordance with transcendent coordinates or categories, and reconstruct, in theory, all possible cases. [203]
*Statistics and probability. Probabilities, averages percentages, standard deviations, and variance, all tend to merge individual features, subjecting them to the standards they helped develop. [203]
*Although very common in sociology, demography, game theory, and other branches of the humanities, statistics and probability are instruments of the commodity space, and incapable of analyzing freedom and signification. [204]
*Computation. Computational linguistics does an excellent job of handling syntax but tells us little about the meaning of words in context. [204]
*They must first affect us before we can understand them. [205]
*In the knowledge space, each discovery is a creation. [205]
*Inhabited by individual signatures that rise, blend with one another, and then disappear, the space of sapience is olfactory. [205]
*Cinemaps enable collectives to singularize themselves, dynamically identify themselves in terms of the worlds they help bring into existence. [206] {fluidiom}
*For example, to using knowledge trees, collective intellects can continuously update their classification of knowledge while their skills and learning abilities in real time. [206] {fluidiom}
*Using health cinemaps, collective intellects can increase their medical skills, manage pharmaceutical and medical resources, combine epidemiology with the prevention, training, and empowerment of individuals. [206] {fluidiom}
*Using language cinemaps, collective intellects can prepare semantic diagrams of their communications, enabling readers to select the texts that interest them, providing authors with a writing tools, and enabling everyone to locate messages within an evolving global context.10 [206] {fluidiom: this is exactly what fluidiom should facilitate}
*Knowledge trees generate dynamic epistemologies as a byproduct. [206]
*They are primarily a form of self-management for learning and training. [206]
*In the knowledge space the preferred object of knowledge reflects the eternal becoming-beginning of earth, the perpetual resumption of becoming of the collective intellect and its world. [207]

===Epistemologies [209]===
====Earth: Flesh [209]====
*On earth, when an old man dies, a library goes up in flames. [209]

=====Table: Overview of the four spaces, The Relationship to Knowledge [210]=====
====Territory: The Book [211]====
*In territorial space, the subject of knowledge is the caste of literary specialists, hermeneuts, the guardians of systems. [211]
*It is shut off from the outside world like a sealed book. [211]
====Commodity Space: Hypertext [212]====
*In the third space knowledge is no longer enclosed, padlocked like a treasure. [212]
*It pervades everything, is distributed, mediatized, spreads innovation wherever it is found. [212]
*Our clumsy efforts to make use of the rigid corpses of aging disciplines are doomed to failure, since knowledge exits only at the shifting margins, the crossroads, in interference, when everything is a question of import-export. [213]
====The Knowledge Space: Cosmopedia [214]====
*In this fourth space the subject of knowledge is shaped by its encyclopedia. [215
*Because its knowledge is a knowledge of life, a living knowledge, it is what it knows. [215
*The philosophical tradition begun by Kant abandoned ontology, the question of being, and concentrated on epistemology, the theory of knowledge. [215]
*In contrast to Kant's critique, the perspective opened by the collective intellect shows that epistemology ultimately leads us back to ontology: there are as many qualities of being as there are ways of knowing. [215]
*Michel Authier and I refer to the new organization of knowledge and in this fourth space as the cosmopedia. [216]
*Why do we say that the sum of knowledge is now organized by the cosmos and not the circle? [216]
*Because instead of a one-dimensional text or even a hypertext network, we now have dynamic and interactive multidimensional representational space. [216] {fluidiom}
*Instead of the conjunction of image and text, characteristic of the encyclopedia, the cosmopedia combines a large number of different types of expression: static images, video, sound, interactive simulation, interactive maps, expert systems, dynamic ideographs, virtual reality, artificial life, etc. [216]
*At its extreme the cosmopedia contains as many semiotics and types of representation as exist in the world itself. [216]
*The cosmopedia multiplies nondiscursive utterances. [216]
*Depending on the zones of use and paths of exploration, hierarchies between users and designers, authors and readers, are inverted. [217]
*In the cosmopedia, all reading is writing. [218]
*The cosmopedia is a relativistic space, which curves when we read or write in it. [218]
*Inscription is a form of surgery (cutting, sewing, grafting, discontinuous operations in general). [218]
*Consultation, however, is a way of massaging or folding space (inflection, continuous operations). [218]
*Unanswered questions will create tension within cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required. [218] {fluidiom}
*the cosmopedia provides a new kind of simplicity. [218]
*Not some mutilating simplification applied violently from without, but an essential simplicity that results from the principle of organization inherent in the knowledge space. [218]
*Beyond the world of chaos and large numbers, beyond the incantations to complexity, simplicity is born of implication. [218]
*Simplification is the result of the considerable reduction of the importance of text in the exposition of knowledge, which results from the inclusion of relational information in the very structure of "cosmopedic space". [218]
*It is they who secrete and weave and sew and fold the knowledge space from within. [219]
*Once they plunge into the cosmopedia, space reorganizes around them, depending on their history, their interests, their questions, their previous utterances. [219]
*Once within, the member of the collective intellect swims around (navigates consults, questions, inscribes, etc.), then leaves. [219]
*Memory of the digital waters: His swimming has modified the structure of shared space as well as the shape and position of its image in the cosmopedia (his personal navigator). [219]
*It is the same for everyone, each time they dive into the cosmopedia. [220]
*Together, they organize the space, define, evaluate, color, heat, or cool it. [220]
*Each one helps build and order a space of shared signification by diving in, swimming around, and simply living in it. [220]
====The Philosophy of Implication [220]====
*In the knowledge space the object constructs the subject. [221]
*Once again, the object here is the perpetual renewal of the becoming of the collective intellect and its world. [221]
*It is as if the subject were fabricated by the subject.7 {autopoiesis} [221]
*As for the world, it is no longer an "objective" world, but the world of collective intellect, the world that thinks in it. [221]
*It is as if the object produced itself. [221]

===The Relationship between the Spaces: Toward a Political Philosophy [225]===
====Successive Eternities [225]====
*The economy of the earth is organized around gift-giving, spending, potlatch, communal sharing, and pure rapaciousness. [228]
*In territorial space the economy is administered and managed for the long term. [228]
*It is based on the regular collection of tributes, taxes, tithes and rent. [228]
*The economy is obviously capitalist in the commodity space, capitalist and thus exchange- and production-based, whereas preceding spaces are characterized by gift-giving, plunder, or rent. [228]
*The knowledge space may give rise to an economy of knowledge, some of whose underlying principles were discussed earlier. [228]
====Towards a Generalized Human Ecology [229]====
====Conditions and Constraints [231]====
====Semiotics Efficiency and "Inferior" Spaces [232]====
====Causality without Contact [233]====
*We can't buy or distribute the thought of a collective intellect. [234]
*We can only commercialize its projection on the commodity space, propagate unattached signs in the media market. [234]
====Release and Desire [236]====
*Each new anthropological space encloses the previous space, imposes its signification, its direction, its velocity on it. [236]
*The history of empire obscures the immemorial cycles of the earth, the accelerated rhythms of industry overturn the slow pace of peasant societies. [236]
*The subjective temporalities of collective intellects are in turn capable of modifying the real time of commodity networks. [236]
*The society of spectacle is that intermediary moment during which the informational sphere has already acquired some consistency without becoming fully autonomous with respect to commodity space. [236]
*Try to imagine the power of digital and media technologies in the service of the collective imagination, used for the continuous production of subjectivity, the invention of new qualities of being. [236]
*There are people in the commodity or territorial space who fear the establishment of a space for collective invention. [236]
*They are unaware that competition is impossible among the spaces. [236]
*Each space thinks and desires the others on its own terms, according to its own figures. [237
*The relationships just described are harmonious. [238]
*The spaces above spread their substance throughout the spaces below them. [238]
*The lower spaces desire the spaces above. [238]
*The ideal is achieved when the knowledge space assumes autonomy, becomes irreversible, and imagining collectives polarize anthropological gravitations, sentiments, and circulation, thus establishing the most fluid and unfettered system of relations possible. [238]
*The word "knowledge" here doesn't imply that power will be given to intellectuals, researches, experts. [239]
*It does not define some ideal state of perfection, but the principle of self-organization, the continuous self-invention of human communities and their worlds. [239]
====The Four Cardinal Points [239]====
*Having indicated the form of the harmonious relationships among the spaces, we can now more clearly identify the cacophonous relationships among them, those that almost inevitably lead to evil and servitude, stifle ontological invention, and destroy life. [239]
*The most harmful relationships are those that occur when the bottommost spaces attempt to violently control those above. [239]
*Evil arises from the earth's desire to control territorial space, when the tribes destroy one another in their attempt to gain possession of the state, when a clan chief becomes the head of government. [239]
*The absolute domination of the commodity space by the territory gives rise to a controlled economy, or planned poverty. [240]
*In large (and small) companies, state-like bureaucracies interfere with economic initiatives, administrative routine stifles inventions, authoritarian control and separation prevent collective intelligence from spreading. [240]
====Emptiness and Plenitude [241]====
*By establishing ports, canals, locks, gates, the parasite pretends to promote circulation, but ends up creating its own territory. [242] {Microsoft?}
*Other intermediaries are always required. [242]
*This is the infernal logic of parasitic inflation. [242]
*The knowledge space is not simply a way out of the territorial labyrinth but a bridge between the three previous spaces. [242]
*It enables the earth, the territory, and commodity space to communicate with another. [242]
*The earth is eternally full. [243]
*It is the space of the gift, of gratuitousness, of endless profusion and ever-present meaning. [243]
*Territorial and commodity space operate through loss. [243]
*Absence, castration, and deferral crisscross territorial space. [243]
*In the commodity space, loss takes the form of need. [243]
*Yet the knowledge space is not always full, like the earth, and lacks nothing, unlike the territorial and commodity spaces. [243]
*The knowledge space is exposed to the void. [243]

==Epilogue: Voyage to Knossos [245]==
*The possible encompasses systems of non-contradictory facts. [245]
*While these do not contradict any known physical laws, they do not take present circumstances into account. [245]
*The feasible, on the other hand, represents a much more limited range of items than the possible. [245]
*Action lies at the interface between the feasible and fact. [245]
*A living and permeable membrane, an active and subtle filter, action transforms feasibility into fact, extends the domain of the effective and transforms the realizable. [245]
*Technology, in the broadest sense of the word, refers to any event whose effect will be to shift the boundary between the possible and the feasible. [246]
*The idea of collective intelligence does not defer the question of happiness. [251]
*Far from implying any form of self-sacrifice, it encourages us to increase the degrees of freedom of individuals and groups, to implement win-win strategies, to create synergies between knowledge and knower. [251]
*The collective intelligence has no enemies. [251]
*It doesn't fight power; it abandons is. [251]
*Globalization (which turns all wars into civil wars) and nationalism, [251]

==© Copyright 2000 Martien van Steenbergen==
====End of note taking, Saturday August 5, 2000, 21:21====

{{succes en plezier}}

One From Many

2010-03-21T12:14:16Z

Martien: {{Publikatie}}

{{Publikatie
|Heeft als subtitel=VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
|Is van soort=Boek
|Heeft kaftbeeld=OneFromManyCover.jpg
|Heeft auteur=Dee Hock
|Heeft trefwoorden=money, credit card, VISA
|Heeft aantal paginas=307
|Is geschreven in taal=Engels
|Heeft als oorspronkelijke taal=Engels
|Is gepubliceerd in jaar=1999
|Is uitgegeven door=Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
|Is uitgegeven in plaats=San Fransisco
|Is uitgegeven in staat of provincie=California
|Heeft ISBN=1-57675-332-8
}}

When you flip through the pages of [[User:Martien|Martien]]'s copy of ''One From Many—VISA and the Rise of the Chaordic Organization'' by [[Dee Hock]] you will find the following highlighted with a marker.

* Harbouring '''four beasts''' that inevitably devour their keepers:
** trading '''ego''' for humility;
** trading '''envy''' for equanimity;
** trading '''avarice''' for time;
** trading '''ambition''' for liberty.

= Old Monkey Mind =

* Three <span id="demanding_questions"></span>'''demanding questions''' appear repetitively throughout the book:
** ''Why are organizations, everywhere, political, commercial, and social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?''
** ''Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alieniated from organizations of which they are part?''
** ''Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?''

* Definition of '''[[chaordic]]''':
<blockquote>
'''chaordic''' \ kay'ord-ick \ adj. [fr. E. ''cha'os'' and ''ord'er'']
'''1.''' The behaviour of any self-organizing and self-governing organism, organization, or system that hamoniously blends characteristics of chaos and order.
'''2.''' Characteristic of the fundamental, organizing principle of nature.
</blockquote>

= A Lamb and the Lion of Life =

* The '''essence of community''':
** Its very heart and soul is '''the nonmonetary exchange of value'''.
** The things we do and the things we share '''because we care for others''', and '''for the good of the place'''.
** Community is composed of the things that we cannot measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense.
** Since they can't be measured, they can't be denominated in dollars, or barrels of oil, or bushels of corn—such things as '''respect''', '''tolerance''', '''love''', '''trust''', '''generosity''', and '''care''', the supply of which is '''unbounded and unlimited'''.
** Without any one of the three—nonmaterial values, nonmonetary exchange of value, and proximity—no community ever existed or ever will.
** '''Only fools worship their tools''' [like money, markets and measurements].

* What gets measured is what gets done
** When we monetize value, we have a means of measurement, however misleading, that allows us to calculate the relative efficiency of each part of the system.
** It doesn't occur to us that we are '''destroying and extremely effective system whose values we can't calculate in order to calculate the efficiency of an ineffective system'''.
** What gets measured is what gets done. Perhaps that's precisely the problem.
** In nature, '''when a closed cycle of receiving and giving is out of balance, death and destruction soon arise'''. It is the '''same in society'''.
** ''Life is a gift which comes bearing a gift which is the art of giving.''

* Eager to learn, but averse to being thaught.

= The Bloodied Sheep =

* No time to waste
** How much time, energy, and ingenuity did they [employees] spend obeying senseless rules and procedures that had little to do with teh results they were expected to achieve?
** How much did they devote to circumventing those rules and procedures in order to do something productive with the remainder?
** How much was wasted interpreting those rules and enforcing them on others?
** How much time and talent did they simply withhold due to frustration and futility?
** It's a rare person who arrives at a sum less than 50 percent. Eighty is not uncommon.
** In industrial age organizations, '''purpose slowly erodes into process'''.
** '''Procedure takes precendence over product'''.
** '''The doing of the doing is whay nothing gets done'''.

= Retirement on the Job =

* '''Leader''' and '''follower'''
** ''Lead'' is word used to describe so many different forms of behaviour that it has become relatively meaningless. A favored definition of the author [Dee Hock], attributed to a centuries-old Scottish dictionary, is as follows:<blockquote>'''leader''' \ 'le-der \ '''Lead''' \'led\ '''to go before and show the way'''.</blockquote>
** Leader presumes follower.
** Follower presumes choice.
** One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipulation.
** Nor is the relationship materially altered if both parties accept the dominance and coercion.
** The terms ''leader'' and ''follower'' imply the continual freedom and independent judgement of both.
** A true leader cannot be bound to lead.
** A true follower cannot be bound to follow.
** The moment they are bound, they are no longer leader or follower.
** If the the behaviour of either is compelled, whether by force, economic necessity, or contractual arrangement, the relationship is altered to one of superior/subordinate, manager/employee, master/servant, or owner/slave.
** All such relationships are materially different than leader/follower.
** Educed behavior is the essence of leader/follower.
** Compelled behavior is the essence of the others.
** Where behavior is compelled, there lies tyranny, however petty.
** Where behaviour is educed, there lies leadership, however powerful.<blockquote>'''educe''' \eh-duse\ A marvelous word seldom used or practiced, meaning "'''to bring or draw forward something already present in a latent, or undeveloped form'''." It can be contrasted with '''induce''', too often used and practiced, meaning "to prevail upon; move by persuasion or influence—to impel, incite, or urge."</blockquote>
** [http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/L2L/winter2000/hock.html Read more on '''The Art of Chaordic Leadership'''] by Dee Hock. In essence, leadership is about following '''responsibilities''':
**# 50% of your time spent on self-management
**# 25% of your time spent on managing superiors
**# 20% of your time spent on managing peers
**# rest of your time spent on managing subordinates

* Enter the '''state of flow''':
** '''Teams whose performance transcends the ability of individuals'''.
** This phenomenon can be be observed in sports, symphony, theater, in fact, every group endeavor, including business and government.
** It is easily observed, universally admired, and occasionally experienced.
** It happensm but cannot be deliberately done.
** It is rarely long sustained but can be repeated.
** It arises spontaneously from the relationships, interactions, and convictions of those from whom it is composed.
** To be precise, one cannot speak of leaders who ''cause'' organizations to achieve superlative performance, for no one can ''cause'' it to happen.
** Leaders can only recognize and modify conditions that prevent it; perceive and articulate a sense of community, a vision of the future, a body of principle to which people are passionately committed, then encourage and enable them to discover and bring forth the extraordinary capabilities that lie trapped in everyone, struggling to get out.
** Without question, '''the most abundant, least expesive, most underutilized, and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity'''.
** The source of that abuse is mechanistics, industrial age, dominator organizations and the management practices they spawn.
** In the deepest sense, '''the distinction between leaders and followers is meaningless'''.
** In every moment of live, we are simultaneously leading and following.
** Everyone is a born leader.
** '''It is true leadership; leadership by everyone; leaderhip in, up, around, and down this world so badly needs, and dominator management so sadly gets'''.

= The Zoo =

* Governance and deeply held principles and purpose
** In the constructive sense of the word, '''governance can be based only on clarity of shared intent and trust in expected behavior, heavily seasoned with common sense, tolerance, and caring for others as fellow human beings'''.
** This is not to say that contracts, laws, and regulations do not serve a purpose.
** Rather it is to point out that they can never achieve the mechanistic certainty and control we crave.
** '''Rules and regulations, laws and contracts can never replace clarity of shared purpose and clear, deeply held principles about conduct in pursuit of that purpose'''.
** People everywhere are growing desperate for renewed sense of community.
** Deeply held, commonly shared purpose and principles leading to new concepts of self-organization and governance at multiple scales from the individual to the global have become essential.

* Money and Computers
** What is the meaning of the marriage of money and computers?
** It's not about banks or merchants or credit or cardholders.
** It's not about data or information or computers.
** '''It's about connections!'''
** No, no, it's got to be deeper than that.
** '''It's about massive change in interconnectivity.'''
** No, no, it's got to be deeper than that.
** It's about all things inseparably interrelated.
** Is there some analogy between the industrial machine age as an extension of muscle, and the computer age as an extension of mind and memory?

= The House of Cards =

* Compression of Time & Events
** The answer to those [[#demanding questions|three demanding questions]] was deeply embedded in '''compression of time and events'''.
** Some readers may recall the days when a check took a couple of weeks to find its way through the banking system. Bankers call this "'''float'''".
** '''Money "float" has virtually disappeared'''.
** However, we ignore vastly more reductions of float suach as '''the disappearance of "life float".
** The first life forms appeared approximately '''4.5 billion years ago'''.
** It took evolution about half that time, '''2.2 billion years''', to make the first time tiny step from the nonnucleated to the nucleated cell.
** It took only half that time, '''another billion years''', to create the first simple vertebrate, then only '''half a billion years''' to produce primitive fish and reptiles.
** Then, in only '''200 million years''', evolution produced dinosours, birds, and complex plants, then mammals in only '''100 million years'''.
** '''Each change reduced by more than half the time required to produce the next exponential leap''' in the diversity and complexitiy of organisms, right on through to the creature writing this book.
** There is no reason to believe this exponential reduction of time to create more complex, diverse organisms will not continue.
** In fact, with the advent of genetic engineering, the time required for creation of new species—'''"life float"—may literally collapse'''.
** Even more important is the '''disappearance of scientific and technological float''': the time between the discovery of new knowledge, the resultant technology, and its universal application.
** It took centuries for the wheel, one of the first bits of technology, to gain universal acceptance—decades for the steam engine, electric light, and automobile—years for radio and television.
** Today, countless microschip devices sweep arount the Earth like the light of the sun into universal use.
** The same is true for '''cultural float'''
** For the better part of recorded history, it took centuries for the customers of one culture to materially affect another.
** Today, that what becomes popular in one country can sweep through others within weeks.
** Nor is lanuage an exception.
** Words from one language used to require generations to take root in another.
** Common words now emerge from the global culture simultaneously in all languages, while English is rapidly becoming a universal tongue.
** It is no different with '''space float'''.
** whithin a couple of lifetimes we went from the speed of the horse to the speed of interstellar travel.
** Men and material now move in minutes where they used to move in months, while services based on information do so in a fraction of a second.
** '''This endless compression of float''', whether of life forms, money, information, technology, time, spacem or anything else, '''can be combined and thought of as rhe disappearance of "change float"'''—the time between wat was and what is to be—between past and future.
** ''Today, the past is ever less predictive, the future ever less predictible and the present scarcely exists at all''.
** ''Everything is accelerating change, with one incredibly important exception''.
** '''''There has been no loss of institutional float'''''.
** Although their size and power have vastly increased, although we constantly tinker with their form, although we constantly change their labels, '''there has been no new, commonly accepted idea of organization''' since the concepts of corporation, nation-statem and university emerged, the newest of which is several centuries old.

= Peeling the Onion =
* Community Power
** The truth is that a corporation, or for that matter, any organization has no reality save in the mind.
** It is nothing but a mental construct to which people are drawn '''in pursuit of a common purpose'''; a conceptual embodiment of a very old, '''very powerful idea called community'''.
** All organizations can be no more and no less than the moving force of the '''mind, heart, and spirit of people''', without which all are just much inert mineral, chemical, or vegetable matter, by the law of entropy, steadily decaying into a stable state.
** Healthy organizations are a mental concept of relationship to which people are drawn by hope, vision, values and meaning, along with liberty to cooperatively pursue them.
** '''Healthy organizations educe behavior'''.
** '''Educed behavior is inherently constructive'''.
** Unhealthy organizations are no less a mental concept of relationship, but one to which people are compelled by accident of birth, necessity, or force.
** '''Unhealthy organizations compell behavior'''.
** '''Compelled behavior is inherently destructive'''.
** SInce the strength and reality of every organization lies in the sense of community of the people who have been attracted to it, '''its success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles, and strength of belief in them''', than with money, material assets, or management practices, important as they may be.
** Without deeply held, commonly shared purpose that gives meaning to their lives; without deeply held, commonly shared ethical values and beliefs about conduct in pursuit of that purpose that all may trust and rely upon, communities steadily disintegrate, and organizations progressively become instruments of tyranny.
** To the direct degree that clarity of shared purpose and principles and strength of belief in them exist, '''constructive, harmonious behavior may be educed'''.
** To the direct degree they do not exist, behavior is inevitably compelled.
** It is not complicated.
** '''The alternative to shared belief in purpose and principles is tyranny'''.
** And tyranny, whether petty or grand, whether commercial, political, or social, is inevitably destructive.
** '''''People deprived of self-organization and self-governance are inherently ungovernable'''''.

* Money, Money, Money, and Plastic Cards
** Money had become '''guaranteed''' alphanumeric data expressed in the currency symbol of one country or another: Thus, a bank would become no more than an institution for the custody, loan, and exchange of guaranteed alphanumeric data.
** Money would move around the world at the speed of light at miniscule cost by infinitely diverse paths throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
** Any institution that could move, manipulate, and '''guarantee alphanumeric data in the form of arranged energy''' [informed energy] in a manner that individuals customarily used and relied upon as a measure of equivalent value and emdium of exchange was a bank.
** It went even beyound that.
** Inherent in all this might be '''the genesis of a new form of global currency''' [which [[User:Martien|Martien]] calls the [[¥€$]]].
** Thus, '''the first primary function''' of the [credit] card '''was to identify buyer to seller and seller to buyer'''.
** Thus, '''the second primary function was as guarantor of the value data'''.
** Thus, '''the third primary function was origination and transfer of value data'''.
** We [VISA] were really in the business of '''the exchange of monetary value'''.

= The Impossible Imagined =

* Leading a Commons Effort:
** Whoever does this job [of leading a commons effort] must be above reproach with respect to openness and fairness.
** It simply can't be done without a great deal of trust and confidence, and that will be hard to develop.

* The four ways of thinking about organizations
** As they were.
** As they are.
** As they might become.
** '''As they out to be'''.

:''“Did the meeting serve your purpose?”'', asks Mr. Carlson, head of The Bank. [100]

* Think different
** The problem is never to get new ideas in.
** The problem is '''to get old ideas out'''.
** Perspective is the Achilles heel of the mind.
** What if we quit about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?
** How does genetic code in individual cells '''create recognizable patterns'''—platypus and people—palm tree and pine—minnow and mouse—yet '''never duplicate a single creature''', leaf, blade of grass, or even snowflake?
** '''What if ownership is in the form of irrevocable right of participation''', rather than stock: rights that cannot be traded, bought, or sold, but only acquired by application and acceptance of membership? [this ownership implies the responsibility of care for the organization]
** '''What if it is self-organizing'''. with participants having the right to self-organize at any time, for any reason, on any scale with irrevocable rights of participation in governance at any greater scale?
** '''What if power and function are distributive''', with no power vested in or function performed by any part that could reasonably be excercised at any more peripheral part?
** '''What if governance is dsitributive''', with no individual, institution, or combination of either or both, particularly management, able to dominate deliberations or control decisions at any scale?
** '''What if it can seamlessly blend cooperation and competition''', with all parts free to compete in unique, independent ways, yet able to yield self-interest and cooperate when necessary to the good of the whole?
** '''What if it is infinitely malleable, yet extremely durable''', with all parts capable of constant, self-generated, modification of form or function without sacrificing its essential purpose, nature, or embodied principle, thus releasing human ingenuity and spirit?

= The Next to the Last Word =
* On joint ventures
** In an early meeting with the Bank of America officers, we had '''gained assurance they would neither oppose nor endorse the intent of the committees to explore alternatives to the licensing program'''.
** They would participate in those efforts, '''reserving the right to act unilaterally as events unfolded'''.

* Human equivalance
** Whenever approaching someone with greater wealth, power, and position, I silently repeat, "'''I am as great to me as you are to you, therefore, we are equal'''."
** Whenever approached by those with less power, wealth, or position, I silently repeat, "'''You are as great to you asn I am to me, therefore, we are equal'''."
** It doesn't always work, nut it never fails to help.

* The next part is rewritten to serve as a general questions and answers on a commons membership and licensing effort. ''Bank of America'' is replaced by ''Founder'' to denote the —possibly biased—initiator of the effort. ''NBI'' is replaced by ''Commons'' to denote the neutral body in charge of the program.
**What happens if a party decides not to join?
*** The organizing principles require they not be left in a lesser position.
*** Their license with Founder will remain in full force and effect.
*** Members of the new organization will be obliged to interchange with them on the same basis as they would with other members.
*** Founder will apply all regulations adopted by Commons to the licencees.
*** However, they will have no voice in the new organization.
** What if a party decides not to join and does not wish to continue in the system?
*** They will be free to surrender their license, have ample time to discontinue operations, sell their program to another licensee, or convert their Founder-licences to a competitive program of their choice.
** What if a party wants to enter the program with a license of from Founder rather than through the new organization?
*** Commons will have an exclusive, perpetual license covering the World.
*** There will be no further licensing by Founder and none by Commons.
*** Participation will require becoming an owner-member with equitable rights and obligations.
** What about local cultures and regulation?
*** Creating such an organization is difficult enough.
*** If it can't be done in one country, it can never be done at a larger scale.
*** Attempting to create such an organization among nations with different cultures, languages, laws, currencies, and economic systems can jeopardize the effort.
*** The Founder will continue the licensing program, and Commons will act on behalf of its members in relation with foreign licensees.
** How can Commons ensure equity and fairness between hundreds of local parties operating under different laws in different markets?
*** If you conceive of Commons as nothing but its core board and employees, it can't.
*** But that's a misperception.
*** '''There will be no negotiated contracts'''.
*** Each member will sign an identical agreement acknowledging that they have received a copy of the certificate of incorporation, bylaws, and operating procedures and '''agree to abide by them as they now exist or are hereafter modified'''.
*** Modification can be made only by governance bodies and methods that ensure that all views will be heard and decisions are not dominated by anyone.
*** Think of it as a a '''reverse holding company'''.
*** The regulations to which each party must submit are created by them.
*** '''Any time a member does not like what has been created, they are free to walk away without obligation'''.
*** '''It is an open, enabling, self-governing organization'''.
** Will Commons be formed if only a small percentage of parties agree to join?
*** No. If two-thirds commit it will become operational.
*** We believe Commons is important enough to risk losing participants that produce a third of the volume of the system, but not more.
*** If members producing two-thirds of the volume do not join, the effort will be abandoned.
** What if the owner-members want to make major changes, such as selecting a new name and abandoning any existing name?
*** '''There will be no restrictions on the power of the board''' to act in any manner within the constraints of the law.
*** However, the constitution of the new organization '''require higher precentages of approval on such critical matters'''.
*** The name van be changed if 80 percent of the members approve.
** Doesn't the antitrust law forbid the formation of an organization composed of competitors?
*** Normally, yes.
*** But there is '''a provision that allows such formation if it can be demonstrated that the service or product is impossible to provide without joint action'''.
*** The Justice Department will then issue a letter that does not release the organization from its obligations under the antitrust laws, but gives assurance that the Department will not act against it unless anti-competitive effects are observed.
** What assurance cdo we have that the Commons can resolve present problems and creat the kind of markets you envision?
*** None!
*** It's a matter of judgement and trust.

= The Corporation or the Cane =
* On incorporating organizations
** The ''Black's Law Dictionary'' telss is that a corporation is "an artifical person or legal entity created by or under the authority of the state or nation…ordinarily consisting of an association of numerous individuals.
** Such entity…is regarded in law as having a personality and existence distinct from that of its several members…vested with the capacity of continuous succession irrespective of changes in its membership, either in perpetuity or for a limited term of years"—et cetera.
** Corporations ''as they were'' bear little resemblance to corporations ''as they now are''.
** The original concept of corporation was a collective entity intended '''to attract people and resources needed to realize a desired social objective beyond the ability of a single individual'''.
** It was created through the power of government and authorized to exist as an entity with limited, caerfully prescribed rights and obligations.
** It was to be chartered for a limited time, to realize a limitied public purpose, in a limited area.
** It was to be open to rigorous social and governmental surveillance.
** It's "natural death" in time was specified in the charter.
** Actions in excess of, or inadequate to the purpose, would be punished by revocation of the charter.
** The increase in geographic scale, attendant risk, and capital that imperialist expansion required fueled the desire for '''limited personal liability, limited responsibility for risk, and unlimited opportunity for gain'''.
** The corporate form of organization became a useful '''instrument for government plunder'''.
** The '''statutes governing such entities have been liberalized''', broadened, and made more detailed in their provisions ever since, gradually '''moving away from interests of government and society to the interests of monetary shareholders and management'''.
** …ruled without comment that '''a corporation is a person within the meaning of the Bill of Rights''' in 1885.
** The for-profit, monetized, shareholder form of corporation has demanded and received perpetual life.
** It has demanded and received the right to define its own purpose and '''act solely for self-interest'''.
** It has demanded and received release from the revocation of its charter for inept or antisocial acts.
** It has demanded and received ever more protection and privilege from governement.
** The roles of giant, transnational corporations and governement have slowly reversed.
** For all practical purposes, '''government is now more an instrument of monetized corporatism than such corporatism is an instrument of governement'''.
** They are no longer, not even indirectly, an instrument of the societies they affect, but an instrument of the few who control the ever-increasing power and wealth they command.
** '''The purpose of wealth is to acquire power'''.
** '''The purpose of power is to protect wealth'''.
** '''The purpose of wealth and power combined is to acquire more wealth and power'''.
** '''The use of the commercial corporate form for the purpose of social good has become incidental'''.
** The monetized commercial form of corporation has steadily become an instrument of those with surplus money (capital) and those with surplus power (management) '''to reward themselves at the expense of the community, the biosphere, and the many without surplus wealth or power, commonly called "consumers" and "human resources"'''.
** Nor is corporate power restricted to power over the employed.
** Global corporations now have the implicit sovereignty over people thruoghout the world, since they are beyond the reach of any nation-state.
** They hold governement and its instrumentalities to ransom for use of land, for reprieve of taxation, for access to natural resources far below cost, for direct monetary subsidization, and for use of land, air, and water as a repository for refuse.
** They do so by the simple expedient of bargaining one government against another for the claimed economic benefit of their presence.
** Under the guise of free markets, they are now able to move their money, their operations, their products, and their management at will worldwide.
** No government can do so.
** No community can do so.
** Few individuals can do so.
** Global corporations are steadily creating a market for government in which they are the sole buyers.
** '''It is hard to imaging a more ubiquitous, finely honed instrument for the simultaneous accumulation of power and evasion of responsibility than monetized, commercial corporations'''.
** When a corporation rips from the Earth irreplaceable energy or resources, no matter how much it pays for them; when it uses any resources more rapidly than they can be replaced, or at less of full replacement cost, it has socialized the cost (spread the cost to society as a whole; the people at large) and capitalized the resultant gain.
** A corporation has socialized a loss and capitalized a gain when it:
*** utilizes highways, railroads, airlines, postal departments or other public infrastructure at less than their full cost;
*** uses the military, the CIA, or any other government instrumentaility to protect its interests; *** diminishes topsoil, depletes the water table, or pollutes or poisons any biological system on which life depends.
** When a corporation engages in unsound lending, or currency speculation and looks to government, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund to bail out its customers, public or private, in order that they may repay their debt; when a corporation is awarded scarce portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to market its ideology and wares, it has socialized a cost and capitalized the gain.
** '''Liability for the socialized loss is transferrd to the unlived life of the young and to generations yet unborn''' through countless government guarantees and instruments of long-term debt, and through depletion of natural resources that required centuries of regeneration.
** The rationalizations that they use and we too often accept ring hollow:
*** That some may have, is evidence that all may get.
*** Power and wealth result from superiour intelligence, effort, and ability.
*** Poverty results from lack of determination and character.
*** That some rise to the top is proof that all others could if they had sufficient intelligence and will.
*** Unlimited pursuit of self-interest (the "invisible hand") will result in the greatest good for all.
*** A rising tide lift all boats.
** When we trumpet the glories of monetary capitalism and praise the fiction of free markets while decrying the evils of socialism we angaing in cant and hypocrisy.
** Clearly, we make love to capitalism in the balance-sheet bedroom called cost, and make love in the bedroom called gain.
** It is tearing the physical world apart, and most people as well.
** '''If the purpose of each corporation is not primarily the health and well-being of the Earth and all life thereon''', if its pronciples are not based on equitable distribution of power and wealth, if it avoids responsibility for the substance of family, community and place, if it has no belief system, or one devoid of ethical and moral content, it is difficult to see why it should have the sanction and protection of society through the arm of government.
** If they [corporations] profess to be leaders; if they care at all how they ought to be, the should '''"go before and lead the way"'''.

= And Then There Was One =

= Quite Ordinary People =

= The Victims of Success =

= The Golden Links =

= What's in a Name? =

= Breaking the Mold =

= The Successful Business Failure =

= The Jeweled Bearing =

= Out of Control and into Order =

= The Emergent Phenomenon =

One From Many

2010-03-21T12:13:49Z

Martien: 16 versies: import van wiki.aardrock.com

When you flip through the pages of [[User:Martien|Martien]]'s copy of ''One From Many—VISA and the Rise of the Chaordic Organization'' by [[Dee Hock]] you will find the following highlighted with a marker.

* Harbouring '''four beasts''' that inevitably devour their keepers:
** trading '''ego''' for humility;
** trading '''envy''' for equanimity;
** trading '''avarice''' for time;
** trading '''ambition''' for liberty.

= Old Monkey Mind =

* Three <span id="demanding_questions"></span>'''demanding questions''' appear repetitively throughout the book:
** ''Why are organizations, everywhere, political, commercial, and social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?''
** ''Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alieniated from organizations of which they are part?''
** ''Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?''

* Definition of '''[[chaordic]]''':
<blockquote>
'''chaordic''' \ kay'ord-ick \ adj. [fr. E. ''cha'os'' and ''ord'er'']
'''1.''' The behaviour of any self-organizing and self-governing organism, organization, or system that hamoniously blends characteristics of chaos and order.
'''2.''' Characteristic of the fundamental, organizing principle of nature.
</blockquote>

= A Lamb and the Lion of Life =

* The '''essence of community''':
** Its very heart and soul is '''the nonmonetary exchange of value'''.
** The things we do and the things we share '''because we care for others''', and '''for the good of the place'''.
** Community is composed of the things that we cannot measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense.
** Since they can't be measured, they can't be denominated in dollars, or barrels of oil, or bushels of corn—such things as '''respect''', '''tolerance''', '''love''', '''trust''', '''generosity''', and '''care''', the supply of which is '''unbounded and unlimited'''.
** Without any one of the three—nonmaterial values, nonmonetary exchange of value, and proximity—no community ever existed or ever will.
** '''Only fools worship their tools''' [like money, markets and measurements].

* What gets measured is what gets done
** When we monetize value, we have a means of measurement, however misleading, that allows us to calculate the relative efficiency of each part of the system.
** It doesn't occur to us that we are '''destroying and extremely effective system whose values we can't calculate in order to calculate the efficiency of an ineffective system'''.
** What gets measured is what gets done. Perhaps that's precisely the problem.
** In nature, '''when a closed cycle of receiving and giving is out of balance, death and destruction soon arise'''. It is the '''same in society'''.
** ''Life is a gift which comes bearing a gift which is the art of giving.''

* Eager to learn, but averse to being thaught.

= The Bloodied Sheep =

* No time to waste
** How much time, energy, and ingenuity did they [employees] spend obeying senseless rules and procedures that had little to do with teh results they were expected to achieve?
** How much did they devote to circumventing those rules and procedures in order to do something productive with the remainder?
** How much was wasted interpreting those rules and enforcing them on others?
** How much time and talent did they simply withhold due to frustration and futility?
** It's a rare person who arrives at a sum less than 50 percent. Eighty is not uncommon.
** In industrial age organizations, '''purpose slowly erodes into process'''.
** '''Procedure takes precendence over product'''.
** '''The doing of the doing is whay nothing gets done'''.

= Retirement on the Job =

* '''Leader''' and '''follower'''
** ''Lead'' is word used to describe so many different forms of behaviour that it has become relatively meaningless. A favored definition of the author [Dee Hock], attributed to a centuries-old Scottish dictionary, is as follows:<blockquote>'''leader''' \ 'le-der \ '''Lead''' \'led\ '''to go before and show the way'''.</blockquote>
** Leader presumes follower.
** Follower presumes choice.
** One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipulation.
** Nor is the relationship materially altered if both parties accept the dominance and coercion.
** The terms ''leader'' and ''follower'' imply the continual freedom and independent judgement of both.
** A true leader cannot be bound to lead.
** A true follower cannot be bound to follow.
** The moment they are bound, they are no longer leader or follower.
** If the the behaviour of either is compelled, whether by force, economic necessity, or contractual arrangement, the relationship is altered to one of superior/subordinate, manager/employee, master/servant, or owner/slave.
** All such relationships are materially different than leader/follower.
** Educed behavior is the essence of leader/follower.
** Compelled behavior is the essence of the others.
** Where behavior is compelled, there lies tyranny, however petty.
** Where behaviour is educed, there lies leadership, however powerful.<blockquote>'''educe''' \eh-duse\ A marvelous word seldom used or practiced, meaning "'''to bring or draw forward something already present in a latent, or undeveloped form'''." It can be contrasted with '''induce''', too often used and practiced, meaning "to prevail upon; move by persuasion or influence—to impel, incite, or urge."</blockquote>
** [http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/L2L/winter2000/hock.html Read more on '''The Art of Chaordic Leadership'''] by Dee Hock. In essence, leadership is about following '''responsibilities''':
**# 50% of your time spent on self-management
**# 25% of your time spent on managing superiors
**# 20% of your time spent on managing peers
**# rest of your time spent on managing subordinates

* Enter the '''state of flow''':
** '''Teams whose performance transcends the ability of individuals'''.
** This phenomenon can be be observed in sports, symphony, theater, in fact, every group endeavor, including business and government.
** It is easily observed, universally admired, and occasionally experienced.
** It happensm but cannot be deliberately done.
** It is rarely long sustained but can be repeated.
** It arises spontaneously from the relationships, interactions, and convictions of those from whom it is composed.
** To be precise, one cannot speak of leaders who ''cause'' organizations to achieve superlative performance, for no one can ''cause'' it to happen.
** Leaders can only recognize and modify conditions that prevent it; perceive and articulate a sense of community, a vision of the future, a body of principle to which people are passionately committed, then encourage and enable them to discover and bring forth the extraordinary capabilities that lie trapped in everyone, struggling to get out.
** Without question, '''the most abundant, least expesive, most underutilized, and constantly abused resource in the world is human ingenuity'''.
** The source of that abuse is mechanistics, industrial age, dominator organizations and the management practices they spawn.
** In the deepest sense, '''the distinction between leaders and followers is meaningless'''.
** In every moment of live, we are simultaneously leading and following.
** Everyone is a born leader.
** '''It is true leadership; leadership by everyone; leaderhip in, up, around, and down this world so badly needs, and dominator management so sadly gets'''.

= The Zoo =

* Governance and deeply held principles and purpose
** In the constructive sense of the word, '''governance can be based only on clarity of shared intent and trust in expected behavior, heavily seasoned with common sense, tolerance, and caring for others as fellow human beings'''.
** This is not to say that contracts, laws, and regulations do not serve a purpose.
** Rather it is to point out that they can never achieve the mechanistic certainty and control we crave.
** '''Rules and regulations, laws and contracts can never replace clarity of shared purpose and clear, deeply held principles about conduct in pursuit of that purpose'''.
** People everywhere are growing desperate for renewed sense of community.
** Deeply held, commonly shared purpose and principles leading to new concepts of self-organization and governance at multiple scales from the individual to the global have become essential.

* Money and Computers
** What is the meaning of the marriage of money and computers?
** It's not about banks or merchants or credit or cardholders.
** It's not about data or information or computers.
** '''It's about connections!'''
** No, no, it's got to be deeper than that.
** '''It's about massive change in interconnectivity.'''
** No, no, it's got to be deeper than that.
** It's about all things inseparably interrelated.
** Is there some analogy between the industrial machine age as an extension of muscle, and the computer age as an extension of mind and memory?

= The House of Cards =

* Compression of Time & Events
** The answer to those [[#demanding questions|three demanding questions]] was deeply embedded in '''compression of time and events'''.
** Some readers may recall the days when a check took a couple of weeks to find its way through the banking system. Bankers call this "'''float'''".
** '''Money "float" has virtually disappeared'''.
** However, we ignore vastly more reductions of float suach as '''the disappearance of "life float".
** The first life forms appeared approximately '''4.5 billion years ago'''.
** It took evolution about half that time, '''2.2 billion years''', to make the first time tiny step from the nonnucleated to the nucleated cell.
** It took only half that time, '''another billion years''', to create the first simple vertebrate, then only '''half a billion years''' to produce primitive fish and reptiles.
** Then, in only '''200 million years''', evolution produced dinosours, birds, and complex plants, then mammals in only '''100 million years'''.
** '''Each change reduced by more than half the time required to produce the next exponential leap''' in the diversity and complexitiy of organisms, right on through to the creature writing this book.
** There is no reason to believe this exponential reduction of time to create more complex, diverse organisms will not continue.
** In fact, with the advent of genetic engineering, the time required for creation of new species—'''"life float"—may literally collapse'''.
** Even more important is the '''disappearance of scientific and technological float''': the time between the discovery of new knowledge, the resultant technology, and its universal application.
** It took centuries for the wheel, one of the first bits of technology, to gain universal acceptance—decades for the steam engine, electric light, and automobile—years for radio and television.
** Today, countless microschip devices sweep arount the Earth like the light of the sun into universal use.
** The same is true for '''cultural float'''
** For the better part of recorded history, it took centuries for the customers of one culture to materially affect another.
** Today, that what becomes popular in one country can sweep through others within weeks.
** Nor is lanuage an exception.
** Words from one language used to require generations to take root in another.
** Common words now emerge from the global culture simultaneously in all languages, while English is rapidly becoming a universal tongue.
** It is no different with '''space float'''.
** whithin a couple of lifetimes we went from the speed of the horse to the speed of interstellar travel.
** Men and material now move in minutes where they used to move in months, while services based on information do so in a fraction of a second.
** '''This endless compression of float''', whether of life forms, money, information, technology, time, spacem or anything else, '''can be combined and thought of as rhe disappearance of "change float"'''—the time between wat was and what is to be—between past and future.
** ''Today, the past is ever less predictive, the future ever less predictible and the present scarcely exists at all''.
** ''Everything is accelerating change, with one incredibly important exception''.
** '''''There has been no loss of institutional float'''''.
** Although their size and power have vastly increased, although we constantly tinker with their form, although we constantly change their labels, '''there has been no new, commonly accepted idea of organization''' since the concepts of corporation, nation-statem and university emerged, the newest of which is several centuries old.

= Peeling the Onion =
* Community Power
** The truth is that a corporation, or for that matter, any organization has no reality save in the mind.
** It is nothing but a mental construct to which people are drawn '''in pursuit of a common purpose'''; a conceptual embodiment of a very old, '''very powerful idea called community'''.
** All organizations can be no more and no less than the moving force of the '''mind, heart, and spirit of people''', without which all are just much inert mineral, chemical, or vegetable matter, by the law of entropy, steadily decaying into a stable state.
** Healthy organizations are a mental concept of relationship to which people are drawn by hope, vision, values and meaning, along with liberty to cooperatively pursue them.
** '''Healthy organizations educe behavior'''.
** '''Educed behavior is inherently constructive'''.
** Unhealthy organizations are no less a mental concept of relationship, but one to which people are compelled by accident of birth, necessity, or force.
** '''Unhealthy organizations compell behavior'''.
** '''Compelled behavior is inherently destructive'''.
** SInce the strength and reality of every organization lies in the sense of community of the people who have been attracted to it, '''its success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles, and strength of belief in them''', than with money, material assets, or management practices, important as they may be.
** Without deeply held, commonly shared purpose that gives meaning to their lives; without deeply held, commonly shared ethical values and beliefs about conduct in pursuit of that purpose that all may trust and rely upon, communities steadily disintegrate, and organizations progressively become instruments of tyranny.
** To the direct degree that clarity of shared purpose and principles and strength of belief in them exist, '''constructive, harmonious behavior may be educed'''.
** To the direct degree they do not exist, behavior is inevitably compelled.
** It is not complicated.
** '''The alternative to shared belief in purpose and principles is tyranny'''.
** And tyranny, whether petty or grand, whether commercial, political, or social, is inevitably destructive.
** '''''People deprived of self-organization and self-governance are inherently ungovernable'''''.

* Money, Money, Money, and Plastic Cards
** Money had become '''guaranteed''' alphanumeric data expressed in the currency symbol of one country or another: Thus, a bank would become no more than an institution for the custody, loan, and exchange of guaranteed alphanumeric data.
** Money would move around the world at the speed of light at miniscule cost by infinitely diverse paths throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
** Any institution that could move, manipulate, and '''guarantee alphanumeric data in the form of arranged energy''' [informed energy] in a manner that individuals customarily used and relied upon as a measure of equivalent value and emdium of exchange was a bank.
** It went even beyound that.
** Inherent in all this might be '''the genesis of a new form of global currency''' [which [[User:Martien|Martien]] calls the [[¥€$]]].
** Thus, '''the first primary function''' of the [credit] card '''was to identify buyer to seller and seller to buyer'''.
** Thus, '''the second primary function was as guarantor of the value data'''.
** Thus, '''the third primary function was origination and transfer of value data'''.
** We [VISA] were really in the business of '''the exchange of monetary value'''.

= The Impossible Imagined =

* Leading a Commons Effort:
** Whoever does this job [of leading a commons effort] must be above reproach with respect to openness and fairness.
** It simply can't be done without a great deal of trust and confidence, and that will be hard to develop.

* The four ways of thinking about organizations
** As they were.
** As they are.
** As they might become.
** '''As they out to be'''.

:''“Did the meeting serve your purpose?”'', asks Mr. Carlson, head of The Bank. [100]

* Think different
** The problem is never to get new ideas in.
** The problem is '''to get old ideas out'''.
** Perspective is the Achilles heel of the mind.
** What if we quit about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?
** How does genetic code in individual cells '''create recognizable patterns'''—platypus and people—palm tree and pine—minnow and mouse—yet '''never duplicate a single creature''', leaf, blade of grass, or even snowflake?
** '''What if ownership is in the form of irrevocable right of participation''', rather than stock: rights that cannot be traded, bought, or sold, but only acquired by application and acceptance of membership? [this ownership implies the responsibility of care for the organization]
** '''What if it is self-organizing'''. with participants having the right to self-organize at any time, for any reason, on any scale with irrevocable rights of participation in governance at any greater scale?
** '''What if power and function are distributive''', with no power vested in or function performed by any part that could reasonably be excercised at any more peripheral part?
** '''What if governance is dsitributive''', with no individual, institution, or combination of either or both, particularly management, able to dominate deliberations or control decisions at any scale?
** '''What if it can seamlessly blend cooperation and competition''', with all parts free to compete in unique, independent ways, yet able to yield self-interest and cooperate when necessary to the good of the whole?
** '''What if it is infinitely malleable, yet extremely durable''', with all parts capable of constant, self-generated, modification of form or function without sacrificing its essential purpose, nature, or embodied principle, thus releasing human ingenuity and spirit?

= The Next to the Last Word =
* On joint ventures
** In an early meeting with the Bank of America officers, we had '''gained assurance they would neither oppose nor endorse the intent of the committees to explore alternatives to the licensing program'''.
** They would participate in those efforts, '''reserving the right to act unilaterally as events unfolded'''.

* Human equivalance
** Whenever approaching someone with greater wealth, power, and position, I silently repeat, "'''I am as great to me as you are to you, therefore, we are equal'''."
** Whenever approached by those with less power, wealth, or position, I silently repeat, "'''You are as great to you asn I am to me, therefore, we are equal'''."
** It doesn't always work, nut it never fails to help.

* The next part is rewritten to serve as a general questions and answers on a commons membership and licensing effort. ''Bank of America'' is replaced by ''Founder'' to denote the —possibly biased—initiator of the effort. ''NBI'' is replaced by ''Commons'' to denote the neutral body in charge of the program.
**What happens if a party decides not to join?
*** The organizing principles require they not be left in a lesser position.
*** Their license with Founder will remain in full force and effect.
*** Members of the new organization will be obliged to interchange with them on the same basis as they would with other members.
*** Founder will apply all regulations adopted by Commons to the licencees.
*** However, they will have no voice in the new organization.
** What if a party decides not to join and does not wish to continue in the system?
*** They will be free to surrender their license, have ample time to discontinue operations, sell their program to another licensee, or convert their Founder-licences to a competitive program of their choice.
** What if a party wants to enter the program with a license of from Founder rather than through the new organization?
*** Commons will have an exclusive, perpetual license covering the World.
*** There will be no further licensing by Founder and none by Commons.
*** Participation will require becoming an owner-member with equitable rights and obligations.
** What about local cultures and regulation?
*** Creating such an organization is difficult enough.
*** If it can't be done in one country, it can never be done at a larger scale.
*** Attempting to create such an organization among nations with different cultures, languages, laws, currencies, and economic systems can jeopardize the effort.
*** The Founder will continue the licensing program, and Commons will act on behalf of its members in relation with foreign licensees.
** How can Commons ensure equity and fairness between hundreds of local parties operating under different laws in different markets?
*** If you conceive of Commons as nothing but its core board and employees, it can't.
*** But that's a misperception.
*** '''There will be no negotiated contracts'''.
*** Each member will sign an identical agreement acknowledging that they have received a copy of the certificate of incorporation, bylaws, and operating procedures and '''agree to abide by them as they now exist or are hereafter modified'''.
*** Modification can be made only by governance bodies and methods that ensure that all views will be heard and decisions are not dominated by anyone.
*** Think of it as a a '''reverse holding company'''.
*** The regulations to which each party must submit are created by them.
*** '''Any time a member does not like what has been created, they are free to walk away without obligation'''.
*** '''It is an open, enabling, self-governing organization'''.
** Will Commons be formed if only a small percentage of parties agree to join?
*** No. If two-thirds commit it will become operational.
*** We believe Commons is important enough to risk losing participants that produce a third of the volume of the system, but not more.
*** If members producing two-thirds of the volume do not join, the effort will be abandoned.
** What if the owner-members want to make major changes, such as selecting a new name and abandoning any existing name?
*** '''There will be no restrictions on the power of the board''' to act in any manner within the constraints of the law.
*** However, the constitution of the new organization '''require higher precentages of approval on such critical matters'''.
*** The name van be changed if 80 percent of the members approve.
** Doesn't the antitrust law forbid the formation of an organization composed of competitors?
*** Normally, yes.
*** But there is '''a provision that allows such formation if it can be demonstrated that the service or product is impossible to provide without joint action'''.
*** The Justice Department will then issue a letter that does not release the organization from its obligations under the antitrust laws, but gives assurance that the Department will not act against it unless anti-competitive effects are observed.
** What assurance cdo we have that the Commons can resolve present problems and creat the kind of markets you envision?
*** None!
*** It's a matter of judgement and trust.

= The Corporation or the Cane =
* On incorporating organizations
** The ''Black's Law Dictionary'' telss is that a corporation is "an artifical person or legal entity created by or under the authority of the state or nation…ordinarily consisting of an association of numerous individuals.
** Such entity…is regarded in law as having a personality and existence distinct from that of its several members…vested with the capacity of continuous succession irrespective of changes in its membership, either in perpetuity or for a limited term of years"—et cetera.
** Corporations ''as they were'' bear little resemblance to corporations ''as they now are''.
** The original concept of corporation was a collective entity intended '''to attract people and resources needed to realize a desired social objective beyond the ability of a single individual'''.
** It was created through the power of government and authorized to exist as an entity with limited, caerfully prescribed rights and obligations.
** It was to be chartered for a limited time, to realize a limitied public purpose, in a limited area.
** It was to be open to rigorous social and governmental surveillance.
** It's "natural death" in time was specified in the charter.
** Actions in excess of, or inadequate to the purpose, would be punished by revocation of the charter.
** The increase in geographic scale, attendant risk, and capital that imperialist expansion required fueled the desire for '''limited personal liability, limited responsibility for risk, and unlimited opportunity for gain'''.
** The corporate form of organization became a useful '''instrument for government plunder'''.
** The '''statutes governing such entities have been liberalized''', broadened, and made more detailed in their provisions ever since, gradually '''moving away from interests of government and society to the interests of monetary shareholders and management'''.
** …ruled without comment that '''a corporation is a person within the meaning of the Bill of Rights''' in 1885.
** The for-profit, monetized, shareholder form of corporation has demanded and received perpetual life.
** It has demanded and received the right to define its own purpose and '''act solely for self-interest'''.
** It has demanded and received release from the revocation of its charter for inept or antisocial acts.
** It has demanded and received ever more protection and privilege from governement.
** The roles of giant, transnational corporations and governement have slowly reversed.
** For all practical purposes, '''government is now more an instrument of monetized corporatism than such corporatism is an instrument of governement'''.
** They are no longer, not even indirectly, an instrument of the societies they affect, but an instrument of the few who control the ever-increasing power and wealth they command.
** '''The purpose of wealth is to acquire power'''.
** '''The purpose of power is to protect wealth'''.
** '''The purpose of wealth and power combined is to acquire more wealth and power'''.
** '''The use of the commercial corporate form for the purpose of social good has become incidental'''.
** The monetized commercial form of corporation has steadily become an instrument of those with surplus money (capital) and those with surplus power (management) '''to reward themselves at the expense of the community, the biosphere, and the many without surplus wealth or power, commonly called "consumers" and "human resources"'''.
** Nor is corporate power restricted to power over the employed.
** Global corporations now have the implicit sovereignty over people thruoghout the world, since they are beyond the reach of any nation-state.
** They hold governement and its instrumentalities to ransom for use of land, for reprieve of taxation, for access to natural resources far below cost, for direct monetary subsidization, and for use of land, air, and water as a repository for refuse.
** They do so by the simple expedient of bargaining one government against another for the claimed economic benefit of their presence.
** Under the guise of free markets, they are now able to move their money, their operations, their products, and their management at will worldwide.
** No government can do so.
** No community can do so.
** Few individuals can do so.
** Global corporations are steadily creating a market for government in which they are the sole buyers.
** '''It is hard to imaging a more ubiquitous, finely honed instrument for the simultaneous accumulation of power and evasion of responsibility than monetized, commercial corporations'''.
** When a corporation rips from the Earth irreplaceable energy or resources, no matter how much it pays for them; when it uses any resources more rapidly than they can be replaced, or at less of full replacement cost, it has socialized the cost (spread the cost to society as a whole; the people at large) and capitalized the resultant gain.
** A corporation has socialized a loss and capitalized a gain when it:
*** utilizes highways, railroads, airlines, postal departments or other public infrastructure at less than their full cost;
*** uses the military, the CIA, or any other government instrumentaility to protect its interests; *** diminishes topsoil, depletes the water table, or pollutes or poisons any biological system on which life depends.
** When a corporation engages in unsound lending, or currency speculation and looks to government, the World Bank, or the International Monetary Fund to bail out its customers, public or private, in order that they may repay their debt; when a corporation is awarded scarce portions of the electromagnetic spectrum to market its ideology and wares, it has socialized a cost and capitalized the gain.
** '''Liability for the socialized loss is transferrd to the unlived life of the young and to generations yet unborn''' through countless government guarantees and instruments of long-term debt, and through depletion of natural resources that required centuries of regeneration.
** The rationalizations that they use and we too often accept ring hollow:
*** That some may have, is evidence that all may get.
*** Power and wealth result from superiour intelligence, effort, and ability.
*** Poverty results from lack of determination and character.
*** That some rise to the top is proof that all others could if they had sufficient intelligence and will.
*** Unlimited pursuit of self-interest (the "invisible hand") will result in the greatest good for all.
*** A rising tide lift all boats.
** When we trumpet the glories of monetary capitalism and praise the fiction of free markets while decrying the evils of socialism we angaing in cant and hypocrisy.
** Clearly, we make love to capitalism in the balance-sheet bedroom called cost, and make love in the bedroom called gain.
** It is tearing the physical world apart, and most people as well.
** '''If the purpose of each corporation is not primarily the health and well-being of the Earth and all life thereon''', if its pronciples are not based on equitable distribution of power and wealth, if it avoids responsibility for the substance of family, community and place, if it has no belief system, or one devoid of ethical and moral content, it is difficult to see why it should have the sanction and protection of society through the arm of government.
** If they [corporations] profess to be leaders; if they care at all how they ought to be, the should '''"go before and lead the way"'''.

= And Then There Was One =

= Quite Ordinary People =

= The Victims of Success =

= The Golden Links =

= What's in a Name? =

= Breaking the Mold =

= The Successful Business Failure =

= The Jeweled Bearing =

= Out of Control and into Order =

= The Emergent Phenomenon =

Bestand:OneFromManyCover.jpg

2010-03-21T11:37:38Z

Martien:

Pierre Lévy

2010-03-19T15:49:07Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Auteur
|Voornaam=Pierre
|Achternaam=Lévy
|Wikipedia=Nee
|Pasfoto=Pierre-levy.jpg
|Heeft trefwoorden=Collective intelligence
|Land van oorsprong=Tunesië
|Heeft geboortedatum=1956/01/01
}}

Bestand:Pierre-levy.jpg

2010-03-19T15:42:13Z

Martien:

Bestand:Collective-Intelligence-Pierre-Levy.gif

2010-03-19T15:37:30Z

Martien:

One From Many

2010-01-03T10:05:00Z

Martien: Did the meeting serve your purpose?

Almaasgaten

2010-01-02T08:51:23Z

Martien: heeft auteur::A.H. Almaas

{{tag|A.H. Almaas}}
{{tag|A. Hameed Ali}}

Normaal zitten mensen vol met gaten. '''Een gat is een deel van jouw essentie waarvan je afgesneden bent geraakt'''; waarvan je het bewustzijn kwijt bent. Als je je niet bewust bent van een aspect van je essentie, dan manifesteert dat zich niet meer.

Het kan een verlies van liefde zijn, verlies van eigenwaarde, het verlies van het vermogen tot contact, verlies van kracht, verlies van wil, verlies van helderheid, verlies van vreugde, etc., van één of meer van die aspecten van essentie.

Bijvoorbeeld, als je bent afgesneden van eigenwaarde voel je je niets waard. Dat gat probeer je te vullen van buitenaf met waardering, erkenning, status, etc. Een ander moet jou dat dan geven. Je komt dan makkelijk in een vicieuze cirkel terecht. Mijn cirkel is bijvoorbeeld:
#ik ben niets waard;
#ik doe mijn best om erkenning te krijgen;
#ik krijg een schouderklopje voor wat ik doe;
#ik voel me gekleineerd, zie je wel:
#ik ben niets waard.

Van een gat ben je je vaak niet bewust. Maar '''de aanwezigheid van verlangens en behoeften wijst op gaten'''. Een verlangen naar waardering en erkenning wijst op verlies van eigenwaarde.

Als baby heb je geen gaten. Gaten ontstaan in je kinderjaren door moeilijke ervaringen. Misschien gaven je ouders je het gevoel, dat jij er niet toe deed; je werd niet gezien: ze negeerden je essentiële waarde. Zo raakte je afgesneden van je eigenwaarde. Zo ontstaan gaten. Die '''gaten vul je op met valse gevoelens, opvattingen, overtuigingen over jezelf, strategieën om met je omgeving om te gaan'''.

Ook de Redder, Aanklager en Slachtoffer (dramadriehoek) zijn van dat soort strategieën om je gaten te vullen. Die vulsels maken je persoonlijkheid tot een valse persoonlijkheid. En daarmee identificeren we ons op den duur. We denken dat we die valse persoonlijkheid zijn.

Hoe dieper de relatie die we met iemand hebben, hoe vaker het voorkomt dat die persoon ons geeft wat we missen: onbewust vullen we ons gat met die ander. We voelen ons met die persoon waardevol. Die ander geeft me een deel van mijzelf dat ik miste. Maar dat is valse persoonlijkheid; geen essentie.

Als dat gebeurt zie ik onbewust de ander als een deel van mijzelf. Verlies ik die persoon, dan voelt dat als het verlies van een deel van mijzelf, omdat die ander dat deel van mijzelf vervulde. Dan voel je het gat; daarom is het verlies pijnlijk. Je hebt het gevoel dat alle zekerheid weg is, of je kracht, of je waarde; wat die ander ook maar vervulde. '''Als je iemand verliest voel je precies het gat dat die ander voor jou vulde'''.

In een relatie vul je elkaars gaten maar ten dele. Zodra de ander verandert, of iets zegt of doet waardoor je je ongelukkig voelt, dan voel je het gat weer: "O, hij/zij vind me waardeloos." Je voelt je boos en gekwetst als het gat bloot komt te liggen.

Met die boosheid verdedig je jezelf tegen het voelen van het gat. Verdriet, woede, jaloezie, haat, angst: ze zijn vaak het gevolg van gaten. De rode knop, die dergelijke emoties triggert, dekt dus altijd een gat toe: het is een reactie om de pijn van het gat niet te voelen.

Als je geen gaten hebt, dan heb je die reacties niet. Dan voel je je liefde, mededogen, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, vrede, etc., vanuit je essentie. Dat zijn geen reacties, maar zijnstoestanden.

'''Emotie is waardevol omdat ze je wijst op het punt waar essentie verloren is gegaan'''. Sommige mensen zijn niet alleen afgesneden van hun essentie, ze zijn ook nog eens afgesneden van hun emotie. Ze zijn erg ver van zichzelf.

'''Verlies en scheiding geeft je de kans je gaten te ontdekken'''. Als je dan bij de pijn blijft en dat niet probeert met iets anders toe te dekken, heb je de kans om de leegte te voelen, om het gat te gaan zien.

Door in die leegte te blijven vind je misschien het aspect van je essentie terug dat je kwijt was, en dan verdwijnt het gat. Zo herwin je jezelf en ben je voor eens en voor altijd vervuld.

Dit is een pijnlijk proces. Als je relatie wordt verbroken en je het gevoel hebt dat je je zelfrespect kwijt bent, als je dan kunt blijven bij dat gevoel, het aandacht schenkt, en diep in dat gevoel gaat, dan zie je misschien het gat, en begrijp je de bron ervan, herinner je je misschien het patroon van gebeurtenissen die jouw verlies van eigenwaarde veroorzaakt hebben.

Als je op het diepste niveau gaat door de pijn van je vroegere moeilijke ervaringen kom je in de buurt van het gat zelf en dan kan je de herinnering ervaren aan wat verloren is gegaan. Als je dat ervaart zal de verloren essentie weer gaan stromen. Liefde, vrede, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, dat zijn aspecten van essentie die je dan ervaart. In plaats van woede te ervaren, ervaar je '''kracht''', rustige kracht; in plaats van je meerder- of minderwaardig te voelen, ervaar je '''eigenwaarde'''; je ervaart jezelf als een afgeronde aanwezigheid die '''vol en krachtig''' is.

Mensen verzetten zich vaak tegen het diep voelen van verlies. Als je in de buurt van het eigenlijke gat komt geloof je misschien dat het je zal verslinden. Als het werk aan jezelf je dicht bij het gat van liefde brengt voel je je misschien bedreigd door verschrikkelijke eenzaamheid en leegte.

Andere gaten brengen iets naar boven dat je het gevoel geeft van dreiging van totale vernietiging. Maar de ervaring met dit soort werk is, dat als je je niet verzet tegen het voelen van een gat en niet tegen het voelen van de pijn van het stolsel, dat de feitelijke ervaring van de leegte daarachter niet pijnlijk is. Integendeel, '''juist die leegte laat de essentie naar boven komen, die het gat doet verdwijnen'''.

Onze maatschappij leert ons om onze gaten te vullen van buitenaf. Eigenwaarde, liefde, kracht, etc., het moet van buiten komen. We zeggen dat het prachtig is om verliefd te worden, carriëre te maken, succes te hebben/ anderen te helpen. De maatschappij is ingericht op de behoefte om elkaars gaten te vullen. Alle reclame speelt daar op in.

'''De maatschappij is het product van valse persoonlijkheid en het huis van valse persoonlijkheid'''. Zij is wat valse persoonlijkheid onderhoudt en voedt. Dit alles is verdediging tegen het voelen van gaten. Onszelf toestemming geven die gaten te voelen en erdoorheen gaan is moeilijk omdat alles in de samenleving zich ertegen verzet. Alle mensen om je heen, waar je ook kijkt, proberen gaten te vullen en zij voelen zich bedreigd als jij niet probeert de jouwe op dezelfde manier te vullen. Dan maak je anderen dikwijls bewust van hun eigen gaten.

'''De valse persoonlijkheid probeert altijd het gat en de pijn te mijden'''; is op zoek naar genot. En zodra er iets gebeurt wat het gat aan het licht brengt doet het pogingen om het weer toe te dekken: als je je gedeprimeerd voelt zoek je iemand die je een aai over je bol geeft; als je jezelf niet lief vind zoek je iemand die jou aardig vindt. Dit gaat automatisch en lijkt de normale en beste weg. Je gelooft volledig in die strategie: als je maar de juiste persoon hebt gevonden, of nog iets meer carriëre maakt, dan zal alles goedkomen.

Het kost mensen doorgaans veel tijd voor ze inzien: het proberen te vullen van gaten werkt niet. Het vergt erg diep graven om een spaak in het wiel van het valse persoonlijkheidsmechanisme te steken, het wiel de andere kant op te draaien en naar essentie terug te keren.

De theorie van de gaten Samenvatting van [[heeft auteur::A.H. Almaas]]' theorie van de gaten in: De innerlijke diamant, Deel 1, Kenmerken van het Zelf. Hoofdstuk 2.

Bron: http://web.archive.org/web/20070329235656/http://www.meningsvorming.nl/almaasgaten.html (hiernaartoe gekopieerd als backup voor't origineel).

==Externe links==
*http://www.ahalmaas.com/

Almaasgaten

2010-01-02T08:49:20Z

Martien: Kleine bewerking.

{{tag|A.H. Almaas}}
{{tag|A. Hameed Ali}}

Normaal zitten mensen vol met gaten. '''Een gat is een deel van jouw essentie waarvan je afgesneden bent geraakt'''; waarvan je het bewustzijn kwijt bent. Als je je niet bewust bent van een aspect van je essentie, dan manifesteert dat zich niet meer.

Het kan een verlies van liefde zijn, verlies van eigenwaarde, het verlies van het vermogen tot contact, verlies van kracht, verlies van wil, verlies van helderheid, verlies van vreugde, etc., van één of meer van die aspecten van essentie.

Bijvoorbeeld, als je bent afgesneden van eigenwaarde voel je je niets waard. Dat gat probeer je te vullen van buitenaf met waardering, erkenning, status, etc. Een ander moet jou dat dan geven. Je komt dan makkelijk in een vicieuze cirkel terecht. Mijn cirkel is bijvoorbeeld:
#ik ben niets waard;
#ik doe mijn best om erkenning te krijgen;
#ik krijg een schouderklopje voor wat ik doe;
#ik voel me gekleineerd, zie je wel:
#ik ben niets waard.

Van een gat ben je je vaak niet bewust. Maar '''de aanwezigheid van verlangens en behoeften wijst op gaten'''. Een verlangen naar waardering en erkenning wijst op verlies van eigenwaarde.

Als baby heb je geen gaten. Gaten ontstaan in je kinderjaren door moeilijke ervaringen. Misschien gaven je ouders je het gevoel, dat jij er niet toe deed; je werd niet gezien: ze negeerden je essentiële waarde. Zo raakte je afgesneden van je eigenwaarde. Zo ontstaan gaten. Die '''gaten vul je op met valse gevoelens, opvattingen, overtuigingen over jezelf, strategieën om met je omgeving om te gaan'''.

Ook de Redder, Aanklager en Slachtoffer (dramadriehoek) zijn van dat soort strategieën om je gaten te vullen. Die vulsels maken je persoonlijkheid tot een valse persoonlijkheid. En daarmee identificeren we ons op den duur. We denken dat we die valse persoonlijkheid zijn.

Hoe dieper de relatie die we met iemand hebben, hoe vaker het voorkomt dat die persoon ons geeft wat we missen: onbewust vullen we ons gat met die ander. We voelen ons met die persoon waardevol. Die ander geeft me een deel van mijzelf dat ik miste. Maar dat is valse persoonlijkheid; geen essentie.

Als dat gebeurt zie ik onbewust de ander als een deel van mijzelf. Verlies ik die persoon, dan voelt dat als het verlies van een deel van mijzelf, omdat die ander dat deel van mijzelf vervulde. Dan voel je het gat; daarom is het verlies pijnlijk. Je hebt het gevoel dat alle zekerheid weg is, of je kracht, of je waarde; wat die ander ook maar vervulde. '''Als je iemand verliest voel je precies het gat dat die ander voor jou vulde'''.

In een relatie vul je elkaars gaten maar ten dele. Zodra de ander verandert, of iets zegt of doet waardoor je je ongelukkig voelt, dan voel je het gat weer: "O, hij/zij vind me waardeloos." Je voelt je boos en gekwetst als het gat bloot komt te liggen.

Met die boosheid verdedig je jezelf tegen het voelen van het gat. Verdriet, woede, jaloezie, haat, angst: ze zijn vaak het gevolg van gaten. De rode knop, die dergelijke emoties triggert, dekt dus altijd een gat toe: het is een reactie om de pijn van het gat niet te voelen.

Als je geen gaten hebt, dan heb je die reacties niet. Dan voel je je liefde, mededogen, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, vrede, etc., vanuit je essentie. Dat zijn geen reacties, maar zijnstoestanden.

'''Emotie is waardevol omdat ze je wijst op het punt waar essentie verloren is gegaan'''. Sommige mensen zijn niet alleen afgesneden van hun essentie, ze zijn ook nog eens afgesneden van hun emotie. Ze zijn erg ver van zichzelf.

'''Verlies en scheiding geeft je de kans je gaten te ontdekken'''. Als je dan bij de pijn blijft en dat niet probeert met iets anders toe te dekken, heb je de kans om de leegte te voelen, om het gat te gaan zien.

Door in die leegte te blijven vind je misschien het aspect van je essentie terug dat je kwijt was, en dan verdwijnt het gat. Zo herwin je jezelf en ben je voor eens en voor altijd vervuld.

Dit is een pijnlijk proces. Als je relatie wordt verbroken en je het gevoel hebt dat je je zelfrespect kwijt bent, als je dan kunt blijven bij dat gevoel, het aandacht schenkt, en diep in dat gevoel gaat, dan zie je misschien het gat, en begrijp je de bron ervan, herinner je je misschien het patroon van gebeurtenissen die jouw verlies van eigenwaarde veroorzaakt hebben.

Als je op het diepste niveau gaat door de pijn van je vroegere moeilijke ervaringen kom je in de buurt van het gat zelf en dan kan je de herinnering ervaren aan wat verloren is gegaan. Als je dat ervaart zal de verloren essentie weer gaan stromen. Liefde, vrede, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, dat zijn aspecten van essentie die je dan ervaart. In plaats van woede te ervaren, ervaar je '''kracht''', rustige kracht; in plaats van je meerder- of minderwaardig te voelen, ervaar je '''eigenwaarde'''; je ervaart jezelf als een afgeronde aanwezigheid die '''vol en krachtig''' is.

Mensen verzetten zich vaak tegen het diep voelen van verlies. Als je in de buurt van het eigenlijke gat komt geloof je misschien dat het je zal verslinden. Als het werk aan jezelf je dicht bij het gat van liefde brengt voel je je misschien bedreigd door verschrikkelijke eenzaamheid en leegte.

Andere gaten brengen iets naar boven dat je het gevoel geeft van dreiging van totale vernietiging. Maar de ervaring met dit soort werk is, dat als je je niet verzet tegen het voelen van een gat en niet tegen het voelen van de pijn van het stolsel, dat de feitelijke ervaring van de leegte daarachter niet pijnlijk is. Integendeel, '''juist die leegte laat de essentie naar boven komen, die het gat doet verdwijnen'''.

Onze maatschappij leert ons om onze gaten te vullen van buitenaf. Eigenwaarde, liefde, kracht, etc., het moet van buiten komen. We zeggen dat het prachtig is om verliefd te worden, carriëre te maken, succes te hebben/ anderen te helpen. De maatschappij is ingericht op de behoefte om elkaars gaten te vullen. Alle reclame speelt daar op in.

'''De maatschappij is het product van valse persoonlijkheid en het huis van valse persoonlijkheid'''. Zij is wat valse persoonlijkheid onderhoudt en voedt. Dit alles is verdediging tegen het voelen van gaten. Onszelf toestemming geven die gaten te voelen en erdoorheen gaan is moeilijk omdat alles in de samenleving zich ertegen verzet. Alle mensen om je heen, waar je ook kijkt, proberen gaten te vullen en zij voelen zich bedreigd als jij niet probeert de jouwe op dezelfde manier te vullen. Dan maak je anderen dikwijls bewust van hun eigen gaten.

'''De valse persoonlijkheid probeert altijd het gat en de pijn te mijden'''; is op zoek naar genot. En zodra er iets gebeurt wat het gat aan het licht brengt doet het pogingen om het weer toe te dekken: als je je gedeprimeerd voelt zoek je iemand die je een aai over je bol geeft; als je jezelf niet lief vind zoek je iemand die jou aardig vindt. Dit gaat automatisch en lijkt de normale en beste weg. Je gelooft volledig in die strategie: als je maar de juiste persoon hebt gevonden, of nog iets meer carriëre maakt, dan zal alles goedkomen.

Het kost mensen doorgaans veel tijd voor ze inzien: het proberen te vullen van gaten werkt niet. Het vergt erg diep graven om een spaak in het wiel van het valse persoonlijkheidsmechanisme te steken, het wiel de andere kant op te draaien en naar essentie terug te keren.

De theorie van de gaten Samenvatting van A.H. Almaas' theorie van de gaten in: De innerlijke diamant, Deel 1, Kenmerken van het Zelf. Hoofdstuk 2.

Bron: http://web.archive.org/web/20070329235656/http://www.meningsvorming.nl/almaasgaten.html (hiernaartoe gekopieerd als backup voor't origineel).

==Externe links==
*http://www.ahalmaas.com/

Almaasgaten

2010-01-02T08:48:53Z

Martien: Verticiteerhark, bron nu web.archive.org want meningsvorming.nl bestaat niet meer

{{tag|A.H. Almaas}}
{{tag|A. Hameed Ali}}

Normaal zitten mensen vol met gaten. Een gat is een deel van jouw essentie waarvan je afgesneden bent geraakt; waarvan je het bewustzijn kwijt bent. Als je je niet bewust bent van een aspect van je essentie, dan manifesteert dat zich niet meer.

Het kan een verlies van liefde zijn, verlies van eigenwaarde, het verlies van het vermogen tot contact, verlies van kracht, verlies van wil, verlies van helderheid, verlies van vreugde, etc., van één of meer van die aspecten van essentie.

Bijvoorbeeld, als je bent afgesneden van eigenwaarde voel je je niets waard. Dat gat probeer je te vullen van buitenaf met waardering, erkenning, status, etc. Een ander moet jou dat dan geven. Je komt dan makkelijk in een vicieuze cirkel terecht. Mijn cirkel is bijvoorbeeld:
#ik ben niets waard;
#ik doe mijn best om erkenning te krijgen;
#ik krijg een schouderklopje voor wat ik doe;
#ik voel me gekleineerd, zie je wel:
#ik ben niets waard.

Van een gat ben je je vaak niet bewust. Maar '''de aanwezigheid van verlangens en behoeften wijst op gaten'''. Een verlangen naar waardering en erkenning wijst op verlies van eigenwaarde.

Als baby heb je geen gaten. Gaten ontstaan in je kinderjaren door moeilijke ervaringen. Misschien gaven je ouders je het gevoel, dat jij er niet toe deed; je werd niet gezien: ze negeerden je essentiële waarde. Zo raakte je afgesneden van je eigenwaarde. Zo ontstaan gaten. Die '''gaten vul je op met valse gevoelens, opvattingen, overtuigingen over jezelf, strategieën om met je omgeving om te gaan'''.

Ook de Redder, Aanklager en Slachtoffer (dramadriehoek) zijn van dat soort strategieën om je gaten te vullen. Die vulsels maken je persoonlijkheid tot een valse persoonlijkheid. En daarmee identificeren we ons op den duur. We denken dat we die valse persoonlijkheid zijn.

Hoe dieper de relatie die we met iemand hebben, hoe vaker het voorkomt dat die persoon ons geeft wat we missen: onbewust vullen we ons gat met die ander. We voelen ons met die persoon waardevol. Die ander geeft me een deel van mijzelf dat ik miste. Maar dat is valse persoonlijkheid; geen essentie.

Als dat gebeurt zie ik onbewust de ander als een deel van mijzelf. Verlies ik die persoon, dan voelt dat als het verlies van een deel van mijzelf, omdat die ander dat deel van mijzelf vervulde. Dan voel je het gat; daarom is het verlies pijnlijk. Je hebt het gevoel dat alle zekerheid weg is, of je kracht, of je waarde; wat die ander ook maar vervulde. '''Als je iemand verliest voel je precies het gat dat die ander voor jou vulde'''.

In een relatie vul je elkaars gaten maar ten dele. Zodra de ander verandert, of iets zegt of doet waardoor je je ongelukkig voelt, dan voel je het gat weer: "O, hij/zij vind me waardeloos." Je voelt je boos en gekwetst als het gat bloot komt te liggen.

Met die boosheid verdedig je jezelf tegen het voelen van het gat. Verdriet, woede, jaloezie, haat, angst: ze zijn vaak het gevolg van gaten. De rode knop, die dergelijke emoties triggert, dekt dus altijd een gat toe: het is een reactie om de pijn van het gat niet te voelen.

Als je geen gaten hebt, dan heb je die reacties niet. Dan voel je je liefde, mededogen, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, vrede, etc., vanuit je essentie. Dat zijn geen reacties, maar zijnstoestanden.

'''Emotie is waardevol omdat ze je wijst op het punt waar essentie verloren is gegaan'''. Sommige mensen zijn niet alleen afgesneden van hun essentie, ze zijn ook nog eens afgesneden van hun emotie. Ze zijn erg ver van zichzelf.

'''Verlies en scheiding geeft je de kans je gaten te ontdekken'''. Als je dan bij de pijn blijft en dat niet probeert met iets anders toe te dekken, heb je de kans om de leegte te voelen, om het gat te gaan zien.

Door in die leegte te blijven vind je misschien het aspect van je essentie terug dat je kwijt was, en dan verdwijnt het gat. Zo herwin je jezelf en ben je voor eens en voor altijd vervuld.

Dit is een pijnlijk proces. Als je relatie wordt verbroken en je het gevoel hebt dat je je zelfrespect kwijt bent, als je dan kunt blijven bij dat gevoel, het aandacht schenkt, en diep in dat gevoel gaat, dan zie je misschien het gat, en begrijp je de bron ervan, herinner je je misschien het patroon van gebeurtenissen die jouw verlies van eigenwaarde veroorzaakt hebben.

Als je op het diepste niveau gaat door de pijn van je vroegere moeilijke ervaringen kom je in de buurt van het gat zelf en dan kan je de herinnering ervaren aan wat verloren is gegaan. Als je dat ervaart zal de verloren essentie weer gaan stromen. Liefde, vrede, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, dat zijn aspecten van essentie die je dan ervaart. In plaats van woede te ervaren, ervaar je '''kracht''', rustige kracht; in plaats van je meerder- of minderwaardig te voelen, ervaar je '''eigenwaarde'''; je ervaart jezelf als een afgeronde aanwezigheid die '''vol en krachtig''' is.

Mensen verzetten zich vaak tegen het diep voelen van verlies. Als je in de buurt van het eigenlijke gat komt geloof je misschien dat het je zal verslinden. Als het werk aan jezelf je dicht bij het gat van liefde brengt voel je je misschien bedreigd door verschrikkelijke eenzaamheid en leegte.

Andere gaten brengen iets naar boven dat je het gevoel geeft van dreiging van totale vernietiging. Maar de ervaring met dit soort werk is, dat als je je niet verzet tegen het voelen van een gat en niet tegen het voelen van de pijn van het stolsel, dat de feitelijke ervaring van de leegte daarachter niet pijnlijk is. Integendeel, '''juist die leegte laat de essentie naar boven komen, die het gat doet verdwijnen'''.

Onze maatschappij leert ons om onze gaten te vullen van buitenaf. Eigenwaarde, liefde, kracht, etc., het moet van buiten komen. We zeggen dat het prachtig is om verliefd te worden, carriëre te maken, succes te hebben/ anderen te helpen. De maatschappij is ingericht op de behoefte om elkaars gaten te vullen. Alle reclame speelt daar op in.

'''De maatschappij is het product van valse persoonlijkheid en het huis van valse persoonlijkheid'''. Zij is wat valse persoonlijkheid onderhoudt en voedt. Dit alles is verdediging tegen het voelen van gaten. Onszelf toestemming geven die gaten te voelen en erdoorheen gaan is moeilijk omdat alles in de samenleving zich ertegen verzet. Alle mensen om je heen, waar je ook kijkt, proberen gaten te vullen en zij voelen zich bedreigd als jij niet probeert de jouwe op dezelfde manier te vullen. Dan maak je anderen dikwijls bewust van hun eigen gaten.

'''De valse persoonlijkheid probeert altijd het gat en de pijn te mijden'''; is op zoek naar genot. En zodra er iets gebeurt wat het gat aan het licht brengt doet het pogingen om het weer toe te dekken: als je je gedeprimeerd voelt zoek je iemand die je een aai over je bol geeft; als je jezelf niet lief vind zoek je iemand die jou aardig vindt. Dit gaat automatisch en lijkt de normale en beste weg. Je gelooft volledig in die strategie: als je maar de juiste persoon hebt gevonden, of nog iets meer carriëre maakt, dan zal alles goedkomen.

Het kost mensen doorgaans veel tijd voor ze inzien: het proberen te vullen van gaten werkt niet. Het vergt erg diep graven om een spaak in het wiel van het valse persoonlijkheidsmechanisme te steken, het wiel de andere kant op te draaien en naar essentie terug te keren.

De theorie van de gaten Samenvatting van A.H. Almaas' theorie van de gaten in: De innerlijke diamant, Deel 1, Kenmerken van het Zelf. Hoofdstuk 2.

Bron: http://web.archive.org/web/20070329235656/http://www.meningsvorming.nl/almaasgaten.html (hiernaartoe gekopieerd als backup voor't origineel).

==Externe links==
*http://www.ahalmaas.com/

Almaas gaten

2010-01-02T08:11:52Z

Martien: Almaas gaten hernoemd naar Almaasgaten

#DOORVERWIJZING [[Almaasgaten]]

Almaasgaten

2010-01-02T08:11:52Z

Martien: Almaas gaten hernoemd naar Almaasgaten

{{tag|A.H. Almaas}}
{{tag|A. Hameed Ali}}

Normaal zitten mensen vol met gaten. Een gat is een deel van jouw essentie waarvan je afgesneden bent geraakt; waarvan je het bewustzijn kwijt bent. Als je je niet bewust bent van een aspect van je essentie, dan manifesteert dat zich niet meer. Het kan een verlies van liefde zijn, verlies van eigenwaarde, het verlies van het vermogen tot contact, verlies van kracht, verlies van wil, verlies van helderheid, verlies van vreugde, etc., van één of meer van die aspecten van essentie.

Bijvoorbeeld, als je bent afgesneden van eigenwaarde voel je je niets waard. Dat gat probeer je te vullen van buitenaf met waardering, erkenning, status, etc. Een ander moet jou dat dan geven. Je komt dan makkelijk in een vicieuze cirkel terecht. Mijn cirkel is bijvoorbeeld: (1 ) ik ben niets waard; (2) ik doe mijn best om erkenning te krijgen; (3) ik krijg een schouderklopje voor wat ik doe; (4) ik voel me gekleineerd, zie je wel: (1) ik ben niets waard.

Van een gat ben je je vaak niet bewust. Maar de aanwezigheid van verlangens en behoeften wijst op gaten. Een verlangen naar waardering en erkenning wijst op verlies van eigenwaarde.

Als baby heb je geen gaten. Gaten ontstaan in je kinderjaren door moeilijke ervaringen. Misschien gaven je ouders je het gevoel, dat jij er niet toe deed; je werd niet gezien: ze negeerden je essentiële waarde. Zo raakte je afgesneden van je eigenwaarde. Zo ontstaan gaten. Die gaten vul je op met valse gevoelens, opvattingen, overtuigingen over jezelf, strategieën om met je omgeving om te gaan. Ook de Redder, Aanklager en Slachtoffer (dramadriehoek) zijn van dat soort strategieën om je gaten te vullen. Die vulsels maken je persoonlijkheid tot een valse persoonlijkheid. En daarmee identificeren we ons op den duur. We denken dat we die valse persoonlijkheid zijn.

Hoe dieper de relatie die we met iemand hebben, hoe vaker het voorkomt dat die persoon ons geeft wat we missen: onbewust vullen we ons gat met die ander. We voelen ons met die persoon waardevol. Die ander geeft me een deel van mijzelf dat ik miste. Maar dat is valse persoonlijkheid; geen essentie. Als dat gebeurt zie ik onbewust de ander als een deel van mijzelf. Verlies ik die persoon, dan voelt dat als het verlies van een deel van mijzelf, omdat die ander dat deel van mijzelf vervulde. Dan voel je het gat; daarom is het verlies pijnlijk. Je hebt het gevoel dat alle zekerheid weg is, of je kracht, of je waarde; wat die ander ook maar vervulde. Als je iemand verliest voel je precies het gat dat die ander voor jou vulde.

In een relatie vul je elkaars gaten maar ten dele. Zodra de ander verandert, of iets zegt of doet waardoor je je ongelukkig voelt, dan voel je het gat weer: "O, hij/zij vind me waardeloos." Je voelt je boos en gekwetst als het gat bloot komt te liggen. Met die boosheid verdedig je jezelf tegen het voelen van het gat. Verdriet, woede, jaloezie, haat, angst: ze zijn vaak het gevolg van gaten. De rode knop, die dergelijke emoties triggert, dekt dus altijd een gat toe: het is een reactie om de pijn van het gat niet te voelen. Als je geen gaten hebt, dan heb je die reacties niet. Dan voel je je liefde, mededogen, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, vrede, etc., vanuit je essentie. Dat zijn geen reacties, maar zijnstoestanden. Emotie is waardevol omdat ze je wijst op het punt waar essentie verloren is gegaan. Sommige mensen zijn niet alleen afgesneden van hun essentie, ze zijn ook nog eens afgesneden van hun emotie. Ze zijn erg ver van zichzelf.

Verlies en scheiding geeft je de kans je gaten te ontdekken. Als je dan bij de pijn blijft en dat niet probeert met iets anders toe te dekken, heb je de kans om de leegte te voelen, om het gat te gaan zien. Door in die leegte te blijven vind je misschien het aspect van je essentie terug dat je kwijt was, en dan verdwijnt het gat. Zo herwin je jezelf en ben je voor eens en voor altijd vervuld. Dit is een pijnlijk proces. Als je relatie wordt verbroken en je het gevoel hebt dat je je zelfrespect kwijt bent, als je dan kunt blijven bij dat gevoel, het aandacht schenkt, en diep in dat gevoel gaat, dan zie je misschien het gat, en begrijp je de bron ervan, herinner je je misschien het patroon van gebeurtenissen die jouw verlies van eigenwaarde veroorzaakt hebben. Als je op het diepste niveau gaat door de pijn van je vroegere moeilijke ervaringen kom je in de buurt van het gat zelf en dan kan je de herinnering ervaren aan wat verloren is gegaan. Als je dat ervaart zal de verloren essentie weer gaan stromen. Liefde, vrede, eigenwaarde, kracht, wil, dat zijn aspecten van essentie die je dan ervaart. In plaats van woede te ervaren, ervaar je kracht, rustige kracht; in plaats van je meerder- of minderwaardig te voelen, ervaar je eigenwaarde; je ervaart jezelf als een afgeronde aanwezigheid die vol en krachtig is.

Mensen verzetten zich vaak tegen het diep voelen van verlies. Als je in de buurt van het eigenlijke gat komt geloof je misschien dat het je zal verslinden. Als het werk aan jezelf je dicht bij het gat van liefde brengt voel je je misschien bedreigd door verschrikkelijke eenzaamheid en leegte. Andere gaten brengen iets naar boven dat je het gevoel geeft van dreiging van totale vernietiging. Maar de ervaring met dit soort werk is, dat als je je niet verzet tegen het voelen van een gat, en niet tegen het voelen van de pijn van het stolsel, dat de feitelijke ervaring van de leegte daarachter niet pijnlijk is. Integendeel, juist die leegte laat de essentie naar boven komen, die het gat doet verdwijnen.

Onze maatschappij leert ons om onze gaten te vullen van buitenaf. Eigenwaarde, liefde, kracht, etc., het moet van buiten komen. We zeggen dat het prachtig is om verliefd te worden, carriëre te maken, succes te hebben/ anderen te helpen. De maatschappij is ingericht op de behoefte om elkaars gaten te vullen. Alle reclame speelt daar op in. De maatschappij is het product van valse persoonlijkheid en het huis van valse persoonlijkheid. Zij is wat valse persoonlijkheid onderhoudt en voedt. Dit alles is verdediging tegen het voelen van gaten. Onszelf toestemming geven die gaten te voelen en erdoorheen gaan is moeilijk omdat alles in de samenleving zich ertegen verzet. Alle mensen om je heen, waar je ook kijkt, proberen gaten te vullen en zij voelen zich bedreigd als jij niet probeert de jouwe op dezelfde manier te vullen. Dan maak je anderen dikwijls bewust van hun eigen gaten.

De valse persoonlijkheid probeert altijd het gat en de pijn te mijden; is op zoek naar genot. En zodra er iets gebeurt wat het gat aan het licht brengt doet het pogingen om het weer toe te dekken: als je je gedeprimeerd voelt zoek je iemand die je een aai over je bol geeft; als je jezelf niet lief vind zoek je iemand die jou aardig vindt. Dit gaat automatisch en lijkt de normale en beste weg. Je gelooft volledig in die strategie: als je maar de juiste persoon hebt gevonden, of nog iets meer carriëre maakt, dan zal alles goedkomen. Het kost mensen doorgaans veel tijd voor ze inzien: het proberen te vullen van gaten werkt niet. Het vergt erg diep graven om een spaak in het wiel van het valse persoonlijkheidsmechanisme te steken, het wiel de andere kant op te draaien en naar essentie terug te keren.

De theorie van de gaten Samenvatting van A.H. Almaas' theorie van de gaten in: De innerlijke diamant, Deel 1, Kenmerken van het Zelf. Hoofdstuk 2.

Bron: http://www.meningsvorming.nl/almaasgaten.html (hiernaartoe gekopieerd als backup voor't origineel)

==Externe links==
*http://www.ahalmaas.com/

Calgary Dollars

2009-11-10T14:10:56Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Organisatie
|Heeft hoofdkwartier in land=Canada
|Heeft trefwoorden=geld, gemeenschappen, gemeenschapsgeld
|Heeft website=http://calgarydollars.ca/
}}
Calgary Dollars is de Arusha Centrum achterban munt systeem dat samen brengt lokale talenten en middelen om onze lokale economie te versterken en de gemeenschap te bouwen. Ware rijkdom van een gemeenschap ligt in de vaardigheden, talenten en capaciteiten van haar leden. Wij geloven dat elk persoon heeft iets van waarde te bieden aan hun buren. Door het stimuleren van lokale productie en consumptie, zijn we toegewijd aan het creëren van een gezonde economie die geworteld is in een gezonde samenleving en een gezond ecosysteem.

Brixton Pound

2009-11-09T14:40:58Z

Martien: trefwoorden

{{Organisatie
|Heeft bedrijfslogo=Brixton-poind-logo.jpg
|Heeft hoofdkwartier in land=United Kingdom
|Heeft trefwoorden=geld, geldsystemen, chartaal
|Heeft website=http://brixtonpound.org/
}}
Zie ook:
*http://buurtalliantie.nl/blogs/nieuws/archive/2009/10/28/eigen-valuta-voor-de-wijk-brixton.aspx

Brixton Pound

2009-11-09T14:40:32Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Organisatie
|Heeft bedrijfslogo=Brixton-poind-logo.jpg
|Heeft hoofdkwartier in land=United Kingdom
|Heeft website=http://brixtonpound.org/
}}
Zie ook:
*http://buurtalliantie.nl/blogs/nieuws/archive/2009/10/28/eigen-valuta-voor-de-wijk-brixton.aspx

Bestand:Brixton-poind-logo.jpg

2009-11-09T14:39:24Z

Martien:

Hureai Kippu

2009-11-06T15:48:17Z

Martien: Hureai Kippu hernoemd naar Fureai Kippu: Blijkt dat het Fureai ipv Hureai is

#DOORVERWIJZING [[Fureai Kippu]]

Fureai Kippu

2009-11-06T15:48:17Z

Martien: Hureai Kippu hernoemd naar Fureai Kippu: Blijkt dat het Fureai ipv Hureai is

{{tag|zorg}}
{{tag|geldsystemen}}

Eigenschappen:
*speciale munteenheid
*letterlijk ‘Zorgzame Relatie Kaartjes’
*[[Het_geld_van_de_toekomst/Vier_seizoenen_in_2020]]
*heeft rekeneenheid: [[heeft rekeneenheid::uren dienstverlening]]
*Verschillende soorten diensten hebben een verschillende waarde (bijvoorbeeld boodschappen doen of eten bereiden voor een bejaarde wordt gewaardeerd op een lagere uurwaarde dan lichamelijke verzorging)
*Ongeveer honderd verschillende non-profitorganisaties besloten dezelfde standaardeenheid te gebruiken
*De mensen die deze diensten leveren, kunnen hun tegoed opsparen in een ‘tijdspaarrekening’, waarvan zij weer tegoeden kunnen opnemen als zij zelf zorg nodig hebben, bijvoorbeeld als ze ziek zijn.
*tegoeden vormen een aanvulling op de normale ziekteverzekering
*(deel van) tegoed is overdraagbaar over te dragen aan ouders of anderen die misschien in een ander deel van het land wonen (bv student die met de hier verdiende tegoeden een collega betaald die zijn vader, elders in het land, verzorgd).

Voordelen:
*Omdat zij de hogere kwaliteit hebben ervaren van deze verzorgers, neigen bejaarden ernaar de diensten die worden verleend door mensen die in [[Hureai Kippu]] worden betaald, te prefereren boven de diensten die worden betaald in yen
*aanzienlijke vermindering van ernst van een recessie en van werkloosheid.

Flowplace

2009-10-13T09:11:24Z

Martien: Via Sjaak Adriaanse

{{Organisatie
|Heeft hoofdkwartier in land=Frankrijk
|Is opgericht in jaar=2009/10/01
|Heeft trefwoorden=geld, geldsysteem, marktplaats
|Heeft website=http://flowplace.webnode.com/
}}
At first glance, a flowplace resembles a marketplace. But it is so much more. Utilizing free currencies, a flowplace gives individuals and communities the ability to build wealth together.

Flowplaces support the emergence of global wisdom driven organizations. No more lay offs due to a lack of money; competition for limited funds; unfulfilling and dead end jobs taken only to acquire money; no more limits on what can be accomplished due to a shortage of money.

Igor Byttebier

2009-09-09T08:03:39Z

Martien: Nulde versie

{{Auteur
|Voornaam=Igor
|Achternaam=Byttebier
|Wikipedia=Nee
|Heeft trefwoorden=creativiteit, new shoes today
|Land van oorsprong=België
}}

Creativity Today

2009-09-09T08:02:21Z

Martien: NOP

{{Boek
|Heeft auteur=Igor Byttebier, Ramon Vullings, Godelieve Spaas
|Taal=Engels
}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Creativity Today}}

[[Afbeelding:Creativity-today-boek-cover.jpg|right|thumb]]

Nederlandse versie van het boek [[boek::Creativiteit. Hoe? Zo!]].

Een groot aantal {{p|parels}} uit {{PAGENAME}} zijn verzameld op [[Parel:Categorie:Creativity Today]].

Zie http://www.creativitytoday.net/.
NOP
[[Has default form::Boek]]

The Banking Crisis: What Can Businesses Do Now?

2009-09-02T06:51:45Z

Martien: typo

{{Publikatie
|Is van soort=Artikel
|Heeft auteur=Bernard Lietaer
|Heeft trefwoorden=geld,crisis,bankieren,zakelijk,WIR
|Heeft aantal paginas=6
|Online=http://lietaer.com/images/B2B_currency_1.pdf
|Is geschreven in taal=Engels
|Is gepubliceerd in jaar=2008
}}
The travails of the banking crisis have been front page news for months, and the
biggest bailout in human history has been completed at the 11th hour and 59 minutes, to
everybody’s relief. However, the real economy, the one where businesses manufacture
and sell goods and services, will predictably turn out to be the next victim of the financial
crisis, in what we call the “Second Wave”.

Semantic MediaWiki

2009-07-15T10:51:24Z

Martien: Typo

Bronnen inzake Semantic MediaWiki.

'''Software en oplossingen''':
*[http://semanticweb.org/ Semantic Web].
*[http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ Semantic MediaWiki]—dé bron.
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms Semantic Forms Extension].
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_Bundle Semantic Bundle]—met Semantic Forms, Semantic Resunts Format, TimeLine, Calendar, Google Maps en vele anderen.
*[http://discoursedb.org/ Discourse DB]—elegant gebruik van SMW.
*[http://tw.rpi.edu/ Tetherless World]—intensief en geavanceerd gebruik van SMW.

'''Mensen'''
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yaron_Koren Yaron Koren]—een van de leidende ontwikkelaars van SMW.
*[http://blog.bigsmoke.us/ Rowan Rodrik van der Molen] is een Nederlands SMW gebruiker/hacker.

'''Data import en export''' (o.a. BibTeX):
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Data_Transfer Data Transfer Extension].
*[http://acawiki.org/Special:BibTexImport AcaWiki]—gebruikt een BibTeX import extensie.
*[http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/Main_Page Semantic Portal Wiki]—gebruikt BibTeX import:
**http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/Kaleidoscape:_a_3d_environment_for_querying_odmg_compliant_databases
*[http://onto.rpi.edu/alpha/rpipe/ RPIPE DBLP Converter].
*[http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/#bib2xml BibUtils]—conversie tussen BibTeX en andere formaten zoals XML.

Semantic MediaWiki

2009-07-15T10:51:06Z

Martien: Rowan Rodrik van der Molen

Bronnen inzake Semantic MediaWiki.

'''Software en oplossingen''':
*[http://semanticweb.org/ Semantic Web].
*[http://semantic-mediawiki.org/ Semantic MediaWiki]—dé bron.
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms Semantic Forms Extension].
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_Bundle Semantic Bundle]—met Semantic Forms, Semantic Resunts Format, TimeLine, Calendar, Google Maps en vele anderen.
*[http://discoursedb.org/ Discourse DB]—elegant gebruik van SMW.
*[http://tw.rpi.edu/ Tetherless World]—intensief en geavanceerd gebruik van SMW.

'''Mensen'''
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yaron_Koren Yaron Koren]—een van de leidende ontwikkelaars van SMW.
*[http://blog.bigsmoke.us/ Rowan Rodrik van der Molen] is een Nederlands SMW gebruiker/hacker].

'''Data import en export''' (o.a. BibTeX):
*[http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Data_Transfer Data Transfer Extension].
*[http://acawiki.org/Special:BibTexImport AcaWiki]—gebruikt een BibTeX import extensie.
*[http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/Main_Page Semantic Portal Wiki]—gebruikt BibTeX import:
**http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/Kaleidoscape:_a_3d_environment_for_querying_odmg_compliant_databases
*[http://onto.rpi.edu/alpha/rpipe/ RPIPE DBLP Converter].
*[http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/#bib2xml BibUtils]—conversie tussen BibTeX en andere formaten zoals XML.

Sjabloon:Is een

2009-07-15T06:50:51Z

Martien: {{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{PAGENAME}} is een {{{1}}}is een {{{1}}}::true|}}

{{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{PAGENAME}} is een [[{{{1}}}]][[is een {{{1}}}::true|]]}}