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I don’t think “global thinking” is futile, I think it is impossible. You can’t think about what you don’t know and nobody knows this planet. Some people know a little about a few small parts of it…The people who think globally do so by abstractly and statistically reducing the globe to quantities. Political tyrants and industrial exploiters have done this most successfully. Their concepts and their green are abstract and their abstractions lead with terrifying directness and simplicity to acts that are invariably destructive. If you want to do good and preserving acts you must think and act locally. The effort to do good acts gives the global game away. You can’t do a good act that is global…a good act, to be good must be acceptable to what Alexander Pope called “the genius of the place”. This calls for local knowledge, local skills, and local love that virtually none of us has, and that none of us can get by thinking globally. We can get it only by a local fidelity that we would have to maintain through several lifetimes…I don’t wish to be loved by people who don’t know me .

 

The paramount aims of city-dwellers concern collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting foreign allies, the supply of water rather than the supply of arms, promoting cooperation rather than promoting exceptionalism, fostering education and culture rather than fostering national defense and patriotism.

Most of humanity now lives in cities, and cities worldwide connect with each other more readily than any other political entity. By expanding on that capability, Benjamin Barber suggests, “Cities can make themselves global guarantors of social justice and equality against the depredations of fractious states. And they can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time in a global form.”

(from The Long Now Foundation blurb about Barber’s upcoming talk)

Take probabilistic thinking, which pervades not only science but also our most intimate decision-making processes. We base crucial life choices on statements that deny a place for us as individuals. To say that “overweight men are at increased risk of heart attack,” for instance, is to speak only for large numbers of men, never for any single man. How should I eat? the author asks. What should I do, based on my character, my desires, my history, my destiny? That is the question statistical analysis makes us oblivious to: “It is not in the nature of probabilistic claims that they can be disconfirmed by example. They can be confirmed or disconfirmed only probabilistically, by other statistical investigations conducted on other masses of subjects.” Taken to extremes, the author says, probabilistic thought obviates poetry and drama, literature and religion: “Can one imagine the Sphinx foretelling that Oedipus will probably kill his father and marry his mother? Can one imagine Jesus saying that he will probably come again?”

From a review on Slate

I’m happy we’re about to start inviting people into the thing we’ve been working on!! It’s called Pinwheel, and it’s a way to find and leave notes all around the world.

We’re opening it up in private beta on the web and mobile web. An iOS version is coming next. You can sign up to be a beta tester/contributor at Pinwheel.com. We’re starting to build the content and community in advance of the full native mobile version, which we anticipate will be the primary experience. We’ll start inviting people in batches next week. To answer the inevitable questions, a FAQ!

What IS it?

On Pinwheel you can find and leave notes all around the world. The notes can be public or private, shared with an individual, a group or everyone. They can be organized into sets, such as, say, the “Tales from the Road: KISS’s 1974 Hotter Than Hell Tour”, “Best Spots for Butterfly Hunting”, “Every place that you told me that you loved me, circa 2008” or “Find me a Nearby Toilet NOW”. You can follow people, places and sets. And in the future, you will get notifications on your phone from who and what you choose. Following sets is useful, because that friend of yours with the great taste in coffee shops may also have an unhealthy obsession with, say, 1970s glam metal band KISS, and frankly, in childhood you were traumatized by a photograph of Gene Simmons and don’t need to repeat that in your dotage. Here’s an example of what a note looks like. This is one of my notes from Grand Central Station:

We’re already seeing original and inventive types of notes. Ancestry, located poems, old postcards, found objects. But the most wonderful thing is receiving (and writing!) private notes. Here is a note I left for my friend Lauren:

But, that’s like…Flickr for Places!

You said it, not me. Is it like Flickr for Places? Ish. Part of why making Pinwheel is so fun, is so exploding with possibility, is that a note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object. Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists and manifestoes can all be put into a note. It is the perfectly constrained, perfectly open thing that you can make into what you want.

That sounds fantastic. But how are you going to make money?

Sponsored notes. You, the people you love, and businesses of all shapes and sizes will all be able to drop notes around the world, highlighted for all to open and see. Some examples. Our friend, Dinah Sanders, to promote her book Discardia, is leaving sponsored notes of places to recycle, places to stop and enjoy, places every good Discardian should know about. Our friend Alex Clark, a realtor with Zephyr Real Estate, is leaving sponsored notes of his properties for sale, things coming on the market, notable things in neighborhoods his clients should notice, and general area knowledge to promote his real estate business. Here’s a screen shot of one of Alex’s notes:

Who works on Pinwheel?

Seven brilliant people, and maybe you! We are hiring a iOS Developer, and Content Interns. Email us your resume and info at jobs@pinwheel.com if you’re interested. We’re proud to be funded by Redpoint, True, Betaworks, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Obvious Corp, and individual angels.

Where can we learn more?

Please follow us on Twitter: PinwheelHQ on Twitter.

I am reading about the work of the late William J. Stuntz, a law professor at Harvard, who wrote about the criminal justice system, in The Caging of America (recommended!) and Stuntz looks for the reasons why we arrived at this impasse, finding it, ultimately, in the Constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights. And I was hard struck by how right he was in what was wrong. The problem, as he sees it, is that the Bill of Rights is about process and procedure, rather than principles. Compare, he says, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen with our Bill of Rights — Bills 4-8 establish our judicial system, and are how we end up with more black men in prison than were slaves in 1850, and more than six million people under “correctional supervision”. Gopnik writes:

Instead of announcing general principles–no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is that justice be done–it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence, and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz think, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice….You can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong.

I’d always been uneasy with Constitution-worship, particularly uneasy about the Bill of Rights, and certainly the justice system, but didn’t have the least idea why. This is why.

Just back from the SOPA/PIPA protest at City Hall, where Ron Conway, MC Hammer, Elizabeth Stark, Brewster Kahle and Jonathan Nelson were also speaking. Down with SOPA/PIPA!
Photo from xdamman

Responses:

“If you’re the kind of person that likes to answer the question “What have you done today?” with the answer “I played video games” Minecraft is the game for you.”
“It’s like Geek Knitting”
“Yard work is like Minecraft plus exercise.”
“You know how there’s a Flickr group for ppl who make things out of Legos? And there’s ANOTHER group for people who organize the things they’ve made out of Legos, with their special shelves and displays and arrangements? Minecraft is for those people.”

Mat has published a new lunch on Free Lunch Diaries with Parker Mitchell, the founder of Engineers without Borders, which seeks to build sustainable businesses in impoverished areas worldwide. He seems like an accomplished, good-hearted guy. These two quotes stood out for me:

He cites the example of transitioning rural farmers away from relationship-based trading (where you know and can trust the person you’re buying and selling from) to a more global and impersonal trade (where money abstracts and renders irrelevant the relationship between buyer and seller).

Later in the interview he says, in contrast:

He suggests that the notion of leading our lives on the convenient and easy track (school > work > money > consumption) — what he likens to merely floating down the river–is at once not a sustainable model for the entire planet and not providing us with spiritually fulfilled happy lives. His somewhat cryptic antidote is to challenge ourselves to go into the vulnerable, into the questions. By way of example he challenges the notion that capitalism as we have practiced it over the past 200 years should be the model we adopt for the coming century.

A book I recently read, Monoculture: How one story is changing everything, shows how the economic story is the master narrative that shapes our culture in the modern age, and that resisting that monoculture is the way to human dignity and freedom. Having just read that made these two contrasting passages stand out to me. You can read a blog by FS Michaels too, which gives you a sense of the book’s perspective.

If there were some way of preserving the human, trust-based way of trade, that Mitchell describes above, AND bringing sustainable prosperity to its practitioners, that would be the ideal. It’s a tough problem, but worth solving.