One of the real joys of moving is unpacking the 37 boxes of books we have and discovering lost friends. One that I ran across in one of the last boxes (still housed in a box from when we moved from Texas to NY 15 years ago) was Mind Grenades: Manifestos From the Future.
In honor of such a pretentious and yet...um...mind-blowing title, here are some mind grenades:
God, Sex, and Family
Signal vs Noise in the Attention Economy
Our media interests are starting to fragment and specialize, as a
result, content outside our preference area will appear to be useless
noise
It’s not about creativity, it’s about curiosity
Given the degree to which curiosity in most organizations is discouraged and often suppressed, the first task is to carefully reawaken it. Carefully, because too much curiosity will trigger corporate immune responses. Fortunately, despite all the best efforts of our school systems and organizational watch guards, the human animal remains fundamentally curious. We need to give permission for this curiosity to be engaged and protect its first cautious glimmerings.
That's how
swarm intelligence works: simple creatures following simple rules, each
one acting on local information. No ant sees the big picture. No ant
tells any other ant what to do. Some ant species may go about this with
more sophistication than others. (Temnothorax albipennis, for
example, can rate the quality of a potential nest site using multiple
criteria.) But the bottom line, says Iain Couzin, a biologist at Oxford
and Princeton Universities, is that no leadership is required. "Even
complex behavior may be coordinated by relatively simple interactions,"
he says.
Alternatives to Empire
We suggest that we are living through a unique moment in history. We believe it is now possible to conceive of alternatives to the imperial project which embody a new way of seeing and living in the world. This requires analytical insight, ethical boldness and strategic preparation. Above all, it calls for an approach that is rooted in a spirituality that can give meaning and purpose to the human journey.
By cultivating such spirituality we hope to lay the moral and intellectual foundations we need to construct a world that is not based on imperial or hegemonic power.
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