Don’t overthink it.

"At the moment, our society’s notion of success is largely composed of two parts: money and power. In..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:51:26 -0400

“At the moment, our society’s notion of success is largely composed of two parts: money and power. In fact, success, money and power have practically become synonymous. But it’s time for a third metric, beyond money and power — one founded on well-being, wisdom, our ability to wonder, and to give back. Money and power by themselves are a two-legged stool — you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you’re going to topple over. And more and more people, very successful people, are toppling over. Basically, success the way we’ve defined it is no longer sustainable. It’s no longer sustainable for human beings or for societies. To live the lives we want, and not just the ones we settle for, the ones society defines as successful, we need to include the third metric.”

- Arianna Huffington

confusedmonkey: thepeoplesrecord: simhanada: thepeoplesrecord:...

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:48:00 -0400

confusedmonkey:

thepeoplesrecord:

simhanada:

thepeoplesrecord:

‘Global Capitalism: A Monthly Update’ published on May 15, 2013

Economics Professor Richard Wolff publishes these monthly updates on developments relevant to capitalism around the world. His analysis is really on point. It’s long but it’s worth watching, listening to & learning from.

Professor Wolff’s website

Professor Wolff’s podcast

Democracy at Work (an organization co-founded by Richard Wolff)

“When capitalism got going, say in England in the 18th and 19th century. It produced horrible conditions for people, paid them horrible wages, they lived in horrible slums. You know how we know that? Because we all read, or I hope we did, the novels of Charles Dickens because that’s what he wrote about..The descriptions of Charles Dickens are absolutely spot on for Dhaka, Bangladesh. So here’s the irony, we live in the 21st century of modern capitalism, and the success is rendered by the fact that the bulk of the working men and women producing for 21st century capitalism are living in 19th century conditions in third world countries around the world. And you know what was a typical feature of 19th century british workshops, if you read Dickens? Fires. Fires, because they’re all old wooden structures and they couldn’t cope with the risks and dangers of machine production so they had fires in which working men and women died in huge numbers. The exact same…it’s as if, not that capitalism has changed. It hasn’t. What’s changed is the idea, in the minds of Americans particularly, that we don’t have a system that works that way. Even though it’s been working that way for two hundred years, three hundred years.”

That’s a great one. I could quote the whole thing, but that’s a really good one. Please watch & reblog.

I understand that this is some dry material for people, but Wolff is actually pretty great at making the subject matter both interesting and relate-able. His comments on the economy, student debt, and global capitalism are so much more important than what most people talk about today. Please, take some time to get a bit of perspective. The more you know.

We were talking about the Chronicles of Narnia

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:44:22 -0400

My mom: I've never read it, I don't think.
Me: You should, it's about Jesus and stuff.
Mom: Oh yeah! The guy in the closet!

Snowmelt (at Little Cottonwood Canyon)

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:01:29 -0400

Snowmelt (at Little Cottonwood Canyon)

Puppy face!

Sun, 12 May 2013 21:55:19 -0400

Puppy face!

New giant friend

Sun, 12 May 2013 21:41:36 -0400

New giant friend

Photo

Sat, 11 May 2013 13:03:58 -0400

Mornin’ mountains (at Snowbird Ski & Summer Resort)

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:45:14 -0400

Mornin’ mountains (at Snowbird Ski & Summer Resort)

insiderimages: The final piece of the spire at One World Trade...

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:24:32 -0400

insiderimages:

The final piece of the spire at One World Trade Center is lifted into place in New York, May 10, 2013. INSIDER IMAGES/Gary He (UNITED STATES)

"Communication fasting is the new detoxing, and there are simple reasons for the appeal. When so many..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:16:03 -0400

“Communication fasting is the new detoxing, and there are simple reasons for the appeal. When so many of us have jobs that require us to be constantly interacting, saying “I hate the internet” is less contentious than admitting to hating work in this age of “strivers” and “skivers”. Living in a world where bosses can email you at 4am and expect a response is exhausting and debilitating, but that’s a problem of work, not technology. If you were worn out from digging holes for a living, it would make no sense to get angry at the shovel. The solution to a society that demands relentless productivity and ceaseless communication isn’t less internet, but more autonomy – and you can’t find that simply by switching off your router.”

- Internet detox promotes the myth of web toxicity | Laurie Penny | Comment is free | The Guardian

"Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 22:04:18 -0400

“

Much of what ails our modern life is exactly because we reduce the value of a human being to a number, say salary or consumer power. And the first to be thrown overboard tend to be the elderly, the disabled, and anyone not integrated tightly into the global supply-chain. This phenomenon, coupled with the growing powers of automation and artificial intelligence which promises to make replacing human beings even cheaper, means there is a very important conversation we need to be having — but that conversation is not about the effects of social media.

That might not have been apparent to those who picked up their Sunday New York Times to find Sherry Turkle’s latest essay arguing that social media are driving us apart. If anything, social media is a counterweight to the ongoing devaluation of human lives. Social media’s rapid rise is a loud, desperate, emerging attempt by people everywhere to connect with *each other* in the face of all the obstacles that modernity imposes on our lives: suburbanization that isolates us from each other, long working-hours and commutes that are required to make ends meet, the global migration that scatters families across the globe, the military-industrial-consumption machine that drives so many key decisions, and, last but not least, the television — the ultimate alienation machine — which remains the dominant form of media. (For most people, the choice is not leisurely walks on Cape Cod versus social media. It’s television versus social media).

As a social media researcher and a user, every time I read one of these “let’s panic” articles about social media (and there are many), I want to shout: Look at TV! Look at commutes! Look at suburbs! Look at long work hours!

”

- Social Media’s Small, Positive Role in Human Relationships - Zeynep Tufekci - The Atlantic

"Design translates values into tangible experiences. Anthropology helps you understand those values..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:06:16 -0400

“Design translates values into tangible experiences. Anthropology helps you understand those values and how the process of making things actually defines us as semi-uniquely human. Design research attempts to understand design and the design process in order to improve it.”

- Dori Tunstall

"Workaholics are driven by fear, and I have not found myself in a position where I need to spend six..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:01:50 -0400

“

Workaholics are driven by fear, and I have not found myself in a position where I need to spend six or eight more hours at work because I’m trying to make everything okay.

[…]

If you’re in this frame of mind and need control, being a workaholic is a socially acceptable way to try to achieve that. Your boss thinks it’s great, and you can get a raise for doing it. In the short run, it works really well because you can — at some level — control what you’re doing and keep pushing the ball forward. You get into trouble when you get better at your work, and there’s an increase in the number of people who want to interact with you and have you do more. So this kind of working method doesn’t scale— you end up exploding.

”

- Brand Thinking: Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, and Other Mavens on How and Why We Define Ourselves Through Stuff | Brain Pickings

"We almost always used “things” as a way to identify ourselves and to identify others. Let’s start..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 13:59:52 -0400

“We almost always used “things” as a way to identify ourselves and to identify others. Let’s start with the human body. In traditional cultures, the art of tattooing was about social coding. A certain number of tattoos meant you’ve been married. Another number of tattoos meant that you’ve had children. This many tattoos meant that you’ve killed a lion. Nowadays, we have a tremendous emphasis on dress and makeup and in our rituals of buying. I use the word “rituals” very specifically. But our rituals of consumption are no longer as satisfactory to us … because they are empty of human relationships. There was recently a wonderful study done on garage sales. When people go to a garage sale to buy something, they actually feel very satisfied about the interaction. Most of the time, it’s because the object they buy comes with a story—a very real, personal story about where the object fit into someone’s life. Whether it’s real or not, you connect with that person through the object. So when you take the object, your purchase of it is more satisfactory. Whereas right now, when you go now to a store, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on branding that tells authentic stories in order to … sell more stuff.”

- Brand Thinking: Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, and Other Mavens on How and Why We Define Ourselves Through Stuff | Brain Pickings

"Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:30:00 -0400

“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured.”

- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

10 Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:44:52 -0400

10 Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:57:20 -0400

“We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.”

- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:51:20 -0400

““Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more,” says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”

- Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"Virgo: This week is a good week for clarity, a good week for reflection, a good week not to even..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:23:24 -0400

“Virgo: This week is a good week for clarity, a good week for reflection, a good week not to even move at all, to poke at your thoughts, to watch the way they move, the ways they loop and dive. Watch for the times they get shaky and scared. Just sit, as long as you can, with the things that make your thoughts turn scary and weird. Make plans to go visit your old friends, to make tacos, to tell jokes, then to get quiet and listen to Nick Drake out on the porch.”

- the Rumblr

These are my very favorite “horoscopes”

“No country has achieved equality and no country will...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:27:00 -0400

“No country has achieved equality and no country will until women can navigate public places without experiencing or fearing street harassment.”

—Holly Kearl, Christian Science Monitor

This semester we were tasked to take the concepts of emerging technologies, the ever present “big data,” and the realities of urban life and imagine a future of how that all may change our daily lives. Being a team of four women, my classmates Willa, Shelly, Mini and I gravitated towards problem we wanted to address: harassment and intimidation in the streets. Through our research and prototyping, we wanted to address the isolation and feelings of shame that often comes from experiencing this harassment. We felt the issues we were dealing with needed real visibility - in the streets.

Change the Story: Urban Fiction 2013 from Minsun Mini Kim on Vimeo.

Because organizations like Hollaback are doing amazing work collecting these stories, we didn’t want to duplicate their efforts. We wanted to take the stories collected, and put them back into the physical space where the incidents happened. Through a cold email, we were able to arrange a call with Hollaback NYC, to explain our project, and secure permission to use their data as a jumping off point.

Through a series of poster prototypes with stickers and a web presence, we formed Change the Story. The posters tell a story in the location where that incident happened and supporters can take a sticker from the poster to wear as a symbol of solidarity. Our vision imagines a future where these stickers can be more than a symbol, and also act as a physical connection between people who have decided to take a stand against harassment.

Thanks again to Hollaback, for their support in completing this project!