Slocum says into the mic, “We’re done,” stops reading notes, and braces for impact. The river below has boulders the size of Volkswagens. – How A $500 Craigslist Car Beat $400K Rally Racers

Time from posting to first drawing was about 6 seconds. I wish I had caught it from the beginning.

1. Aza Raskin has a good overview of how people use the web in China.  There’s a service over there called QQ that started with chat and has morphed into everything.  About that:

Whereas chat is fundamentally about people with information tacked on, the Web is fundamentally about information with people tacked on.

True enough.  Also about status in the community:

What QQ does to incentive its community is rather weird. The normal things they do is give contributors special VIP standing — special logins and special abilities. The abnormal thing they do is give those VIP folks the ability to access other people’s private data. Scary.

Uhh, yeah.  Scary.

2. David Eaves has a post up about cultural theories of risk and the rise of emergence systems.  That title doesn’t really communicate the content (at least not to me) but there’s some good stuff in the post about how the emergent communities on the web differ from the classic left/right arguments and how it might be worth it to consider other modalities for thinking about how people think about problems and self-identify.

There are few examples of egalitarians (or emergents) that spring to mind as successful – certainly the organizational and political discourse has been dominated by hierarchists and individualists. Maybe this explains why people have such a hard time defining new forms of organisation – like open-source projects. They are trying to peg their participants as either right-wing market loving individualists or left-wing regulation loving hierarchists. The fact is they are neither. While hardly uniform, my experience is that they are often libertarians (low-grid) who believe in free-association, collaboration and emergent systems (high-group).

3. Bruce Sterling has written what I might call a post – The Last Viridian Note.  It’s worth a read, and frankly all of Bruce’s stuff is worth following.  Bruce manages to touch on a lot of things that I care about – how we relate to the things we own, what our priorities should be in how we spend our resources in the future and what the role of design should be.  He also includes what I think is the best definition for what Sustainability really means in the world:

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

No, seriously, go read it.  It’s long but it’s worth your time and attention.

4. Lawrence Lessig has a video up of his speech on “Speech, Privacy and the Internet: The University and Beyond”. It’s interesting because it’s not one of his usual topics.  But he brings some great thinking to the table, as usual.  Sorry, no quotes.  It’s audio/visual.

5. A great ad for Harley-Davidson:

The other end of Wall Street connects with millions of better roads. All leading from the stink of greed and billion-dollar bankruptcies. If it was all just a casino, where were the complimentary cocktails?

6. And finally, because it’s great music I leave you with a song that Fred Wilson posted.  Just go listen.

Metal Heart from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

The entire episode is full of awesome. Go watch it. His feeds are pretty awesome, too. (Thanks go to Jonathan Zittrain who set up the moment.)

Fred Wilson posts some excerpts from an essay on what comes after post-modernism (tiny link). A little bit thick, but an interesting idea. That our next era will be defined by participation instead of what others tell us is real. A reality defined by our actions and what we take part in.

Bruce Sterling links to an interesting article on “Communal Genius” (tiny link). Sometimes I think that the Mozilla community is like this. We’ve managed to attract some very interesting people and it feels like we’re growing from doing something really great to doing something really amazing. I’m not sure what that is, or what form it will take, but it feels like it’s there, just out of reach.

And both of these make me think of Ze Frank‘s talk at TED a few years ago. (You should watch this no matter what you think of those two links above. No, seriously, go watch it.) At the end he talks about creating these interesting places for normal people to do amazing things. Where their small, low-barrier participation creates something greater than the sum of its parts. I love that he’s thinking about these things methodically and understands what he’s doing.

And I totally get Ze’s 80% comment. I love that feeling. It’s why I have a hard time opening Christmas presents.

You’re welcome.