The Katrina disaster has begun to show very clearly that the combination of an oligarchic command and control political leadership. tax-cut driven ideology of small government, and a corporate media in collusion with the political agenda is a recipe for class division and sociall unrest.
And .. there is now in place an infrastructure for alternatives .. the Web and blogs and web services like PayPal or aother ways of accepting and routing resources. There is also a critical mass of people using the Web and blogs and other social software to interact.
The combination of technological infrastructure and socio-political dynamics are such that movements like citizen journalism journalism and coordination of activist efforsts now have enough traction to continue to grow in reach and effectiveness.
What is perhaps not yet mature enough is a critical mass of psychology .. attittudes about dissent, questioning, critiques, reform of electoral finance and representative geographic and population voting processes and such.
But there is a gathering confluence of forces that suggest a groundswell for social, political and economic revolution.
May we live in interesting times.
… and a shout out to the great one-day blogwalk organized by Nancy White and Lilia Efimova in the Fremont District of Seattle. I spent a great day with older friends like Roland Tanglao, Kris Krug and Lee LeFever, met Nancy and Lilia for the second time, and enjoyed meeting Liz Lawley. Korby, Jia, Phil Klein, Nick Finck, Cyprien Lomas of Vancouver.
And I also had the privilege of meeting Christie Lee-Engel whom I’ve *met* through comments on the blog. I enjoyed meeting you, Christie … and sorry if I seemed wound-up or overly intense …yesterday got me going.
It was a day of talking about the social and political dynamics of blogging and the reasons. structures and processes of meeting and interacting with people (unconferences .. a notion that has begun to be discussed as technologists, geeks and bloggers are on an increasingly wide-pread and more frequent basis encountering the dynamics of group processes.
Unconferences (preceeded in organizational settings by OD processes like self-managing teams, skunkworks, and Open Space) are beginning to be another phenomenon where the dynamics of purposeful interaction and knowedge *work* and play is meeting the dissoving of rigid hirearchical structures and top-down, expertise-driven processes.
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