Richard for real

This is just a little sidetrack from a discussion on sustainable global development that I had with one of my best friends a little while ago.

We were talking about the impact of new technology on sustainability and came to argue about whether new technology alone is enough to create a sustainable global community. Being more skeptical than my friend, I argued that even with huge technological advances some behavioral change is also necessary (in addition to the change in behavior that comes with new technological solutions of course) to achieve sustainability. To cut a long story short the conclusion we finally came to was that there might be some sort of scale between the two extremes of great technologicaladvance and largely keeping with today’s behavior at one end and significant behavior in change and sticking with today’s technology level at the other. If this model is correct, I believe that our challenge is to find a reasonable combination of the two end-points of the scale. Technological progress in inevitable, and does good, but at the same it would be stupid not to strive for a more sustainable lifestyle per se. What we need to do is to find the optimum division between energy spent on developing greener technology and establishing greener lifestyles. In my personal opinion, this would mean shifting part of our present technological focus towards lifestyles.

Finally some spontaneous and inspired writing, as it’s supposed to be. And again it’s a retake of some dialog with some friend. I really should have an audio blog, or would that be a podcast?

1. Buy a 747, redo the interior: two dancefloors, a few bars, chill-out and a VIP area next to the cockpit. Make sure the oxygen masks can be appropriately when need be. Then fly this baby around the globe and set up the most awesome parties at airports of major cities. Get a few resident DJs aboard and fill up with local acts from wherever you’ve landed.

2. Pick the 15 most bustling spots on the globe for a year to come. Send out clever correspondents to each of these spots and make them really get under the skin of the place and produce unmatched content. Content that brings understanding, fascination and inspiration. Batch it all up on a pay for access or ad financed website. It will be marvelous, all kinds of media, all kinds of people, all kinds of ideas.

3. Make a 24 hr agency that does everything by coupling 10 really creative, connect-and-make-it-happen kind of people in 5 teams and let them set up bases in suitable time zones. This way, there will always be someone on duty to take calls and cross culture global issues will not be a problem. Global, small-scale and efficiency can all come together. What could these people do then? Well, anything really, investigations, advertising, entrepreneurial projects, videos, events, etc and so on.

I don’t care anymore.

I’ve read more cultural theory than usual lately and this little observation of mine got stuck my head:

The majority gets uniform uniqueness. The minority gets unique uniformity.

The idea here is that a majority of people in today’s society strive be unique, and have a personal style or whatnot, and in doing so end up looking very much the same, but all with their own little tweaks. Then there might be a smaller group of people who are try to mark their difference to this group that ends up being (almost) all the same. These people will find something that clearly sets them apart from the mainstream and apply this to themselves so meticulously that they end up being more uniform as a group than the mindless followers of trends they are rejecting. The harder the minority try to cut themselves from the hype, thus creating a (counter)hype of their own, the more uniform they become internally as a group.

And while thinking about this, go read up on hipsters as the ”embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force” on Wikipedia.

Download and read a very interesting report from the British Sustainable Development Commission. Professor Peter Jackson explores the interrelatedness of economical, ecological and social sustainability. The text is very accessible and it’s gauranteed to make you think.

Ok, here’s a little quick post which will hopefully inspire some further thinking. There is this guy named Zimbardo at Stanford University. He did a really interesting psychological experiment in the seventies. This experiment was bout letting two groupsof random normal people act as prisoners and guards respectively in a made-up prison in the university’s basement. Long story short, the experiment had to be aborted after a couple of days because the guards were almost killing the prisoners. This experience led Zimbardo to deduce the following seven step process by which an ordinary individual can be lead to do really nasty things to others:

1. Mindlessly taking the first small step

2. Dehumanizing others

3. Anonymity

4. Diffusion of personla responsibility

5. Blind obedience to authority

6. Uncritical conformity to group norms

7. Passive tolerance of evil

Now this might seem a bit depressing, but this guy I met a while back, Walter Naeslund, has done some thinking on this and came up with a suggestion on how to reverse the process:

1. Being mindful of consequences

2. Humanizing others

3. Transparency

4. Clarity of personal responsibility

5. Personal values

6. Integrity

7. Active intolerance of evil

For some more info on this thing, check out Walter’s slideshow. Over and out.