Snippets

Twelve thousand years ago, give or take, the static pleasures of this long, undifferentiated epoch gave way to history proper. The hunter-gatherer bands lucky enough to find themselves on the flanks of the Zagros Mountains, or the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, began herding and farming. The rise of agriculture allowed for permanent settlements, which, growing dense, became cities. Urban commerce demanded division of labor, professional specialization, and bureaucratic oversight. Because wheat, unlike wild berries or the hindquarters of an aurochs, was a storable, countable good that appeared on a routine schedule, the selfish administrators of inchoate kingdoms could easily collect taxes, or tributes. Writing, which first emerged in the service of accounting, abetted the sort of control and surveillance upon which primitive racketeers came to depend. Where hunter-gatherers had hunted and gathered only enough to meet the demands of the day, agricultural communities created history’s first surpluses, and the extraction of tributes propped up rent-seeking élites and the managerial pyramids—not to mention standing armies—necessary to maintain their privilege. The rise of the arts, technology, and monumental architecture was the upside of the creation and immiseration of a peasant class.

In his book "The Order of Time," Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli suggests that our perception of time — our sense that time is forever flowing forward — could be a highly subjective projection. After all, when you look at reality on the smallest scale (using equations of quantum gravity, at least), time vanishes.

"If I observe the microscopic state of things," writes Rovelli, "then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between 'cause' and 'effect.'

Wow! Such an amazing article!!!

https://jamesclear.com/why-facts-dont-change-minds

The world would be a better place if we all approached discourse with this attitude or mindset.

This bit about proximity:

"Perhaps it is not difference, but distance that breeds tribalism and hostility. As proximity increases, so does understanding. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's quote, “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.”

From the article:

"Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome.

The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially.

The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us:

“Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.”

More:

"If the goal is to actually change minds, then I don't believe criticizing the other side is the best approach.

Most people argue to win, not to learn. As Julia Galef so aptly puts it: people often act like soldiers rather than scouts. Soldiers are on the intellectual attack, looking to defeat the people who differ from them. Victory is the operative emotion. Scouts, meanwhile, are like intellectual explorers, slowly trying to map the terrain with others. Curiosity is the driving force.

Over the years this framework keeps adapting...

If British children gathered in the glow of the kitchen hearth to hear stories about magic swords and talking bears, American children sat at their mother’s knee listening to tales larded with moral messages about a world where life was hard, obedience emphasized, and Christian morality valued. Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the kinds of stories that appeal to the furthest reaches of children’s imagination.

[...]

Popular storytelling in the New World instead tended to celebrate in words and song the larger-than-life exploits of ordinary men and women: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, even a mule named Sal on the Erie Canal. Out of bragging contests in logging and mining camps came even greater exaggerations—Tall Tales—about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, the twister-riding cowboy Pecos Bill, and that steel-driving man John Henry, who, born a slave, died with a hammer in his hand. All of these characters embodied the American promise: They earned their fame.

[...]

In Scotland, Bateman in turn suggests the difference between the countries may be that Americans “lack the kind of ironic humor needed for questioning the reliability of reality”—very different from the wry, self-deprecating humor of the British. Which means American tales can come off a bit “preachy” to British ears. The award-winning Maurice Sendak-illustrated book of etiquette: What Do You Say, Dear? comes to mind. Even Little Women is described by Bateman as something of a Protestant “parable about doing your best in trying circumstances.”

SOURCE Corporate Takeover - The Collapse of the Muzak/Music Distinction

Urban Outfitters makes music playlists available for download on their website. About the sixth in the series (LSTN#6), the most recent at the time of this writing, the company says, 

“THNKS FR DWNLDNG LSTN! We’ve scoped the Internet, scoured our iTunes library, barged our way onto guest lists and caught 3 AM secret shows — all in the name of compiling 25 of the best new tracks out there. Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Muzak is functional music used to promote consumption. The difference between pre- and post-reconfiguration muzak is that the former was produced specifically for the purpose of being piped into public places in order to influence people. Licensed music might or might not have originally been recorded with the intent to distribute massively, but in many cases the music was not produced for the express purpose of being played in stores to increase sales. That is, many artists’ original goals did not include contributing to the creation of a brand (presumably). So if “Yesterday” by The Beatles is muzak when played in a retail outlet, where it’s played for the utilitarian purpose of inspiring consumerism, is it muzak when played on a home stereo system? Is “once muzak always muzak” a valid principle, or is it now possible for a song to be both music and muzak? Could it be that the distinction is no longer useful?

“So if ‘Yesterday’ by The Beatles is muzak when played in a retail outlet, where it’s played for the utilitarian purpose of inspiring consumerism, is it muzak when played on a home stereo system?”

Shopping is no longer a task whose stressfulness can be ameliorated by the soothing, almost subliminal broadcast of a light arrangement of “Stardust”; it is rather an opportunity to engage with products while listening and discovering compelling music, music the consumer will want to take from the store into the home. 

This is the central movement: background music utilized the familiar sounds of domestic music to familiarize and make comfortable public spaces; foreground music utilizes taste and lifestyle to acculturate consumers about what they should listen to in private. 

And of course, if consumers have compelling music experiences in-store, they will seek to recreate them with their iPods at home, at work, in transit, at the gym, etc. If consumers are moved by music they hear in stores, they will willingly program themselves by listening to songs whose central associations are with commercial products.

[...]

SOURCE The Trouble with Contemporary Music Criticism - Retromania, Retro-historicism, and History - by JAMES PARKER AND NICHOLAS CROGGON · January 16, 2014

[...]

In an essay published in e-flux journal in 2010, the philosopher and art critic Boris Groys reminds us that the modern era, and particularly modern technology, constantly confronts us with the “inevitable” movement of progress: iPhone, iPhone 2, iPhone 3, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S. 

The obvious problem with such an approach is that it quickly becomes self-defeating. The iPhone 5 was always already superseded, obsolete. The real truth of its existence is the anticipation of the newer and better iPhone 6. What is new today will be old tomorrow, just as what is old today was new the day before. And the logic of progress suddenly starts to seem less exhilarating, more interminable

As Groys explains, the early-20th-century artistic avant-garde attempted to address this problem of the destructive progress of history

How to make the art of the future when that art is always, necessarily, rendered old? 

The answer was to stop creating the art of the future altogether. Only then would it be possible to produce something lasting, art that truly resisted the destructive forces of progress.

So what we see with works like Malevich’s Black Square and Duchamp’s Fountain is a shift from a logic of “invention” to one of “discovery,” a total repudiation, in other words, of progress and originality as such. 

These are works that no longer attempt to be “new,” but rather to discern and to manifest something about the “conditions for the emergence and contemplation of any other image,” any other work, in general.

…after Duchamp, whenever we attend a museum, we now know that it is the institutional conditions that produce the “artwork” at least as much as the artist. It is precisely the act of placing the urinal in the gallery and naming it art that makes it so. And in both cases, Groys shows us that it is the very “weakness” of the work — its refusal to manifest the will of the artist, precisely its refusal to be inventive or original, the fact that literally anyone could have done it — that guarantees its timelessness.

For Groys, the avant-garde attempted to overcome the tyranny of time’s progress by making not “strong” masterpieces of art (Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath, Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows), but works (a urinal signed and dated, a black square) whose transcendence consisted precisely in their weakness.

As Groys notes, for the general public today, avant-garde art (from Malevich to Cage) is seen as non-democratic and elitist: we’ve all heard ourselves, our parents, or our friends stand in front of an allegedly important work of modern art and cry disdainfully, “I could do that!”

For Groys, however, this is precisely the point. Because avant-garde art is comprised of weak gestures, anyone can do it, which makes it fundamentally democratic. Popular art today is made for a population consisting of spectators, whereas avant-garde art is made for a population consisting of artists, who could be anyone.

We could run an identical argument in relation to contemporary music’s avant-underground.

Take, for instance, the 2012/13 experimental micro-genre vaporwave. Here is a genre that is democratic in exactly the sense envisaged by Groys. Vaporwave is democratic because, in principle, anyone could do it. 

At its most basic — which is also to say at its most radical — vaporwave consists of nothing more than an act of reframing, normally of some chintzy piece of forgotten muzak dredged up from the depths of the web. Sometimes, admittedly, this is accompanied by a bit of artful chopping and screwing, but such techniques are also democratic in the sense that they are available to anyone with Ableton and a computer.

Vaporwave is a particularly “weak” genre, in other words, because “by dramatically foregrounding the act of appropriation, precisely by refusing to be ‘original,’” what vaporwave does is make “the listening experience all about that original; maybe even about the discourse of originality itself” (ref). 

Vaporwave is not itself muzak, in other words, it is about muzak. 

And as a result, it forces us to reconsider the extent of our commitment to a whole series of apparent distinctions: between “-sic” and “-zak,” high and low, art and commerce, culture and trash. It forces us to consider the conditions of contemporary musical listening and production per se.

Writing at the time of Nazi ascendancy in Germany, Walter Benjamin identified that the “proletarianization” of humankind would pose a unique challenge to fascist ideologues who sought mass public appeal without any intent to change the structures oppressing that same public. Such a feat was only accomplished through appeals to ideology: “Fascism sees its salvation,” Benjamin writes, “in giving [the newly created proletarian] masses […] a chance to express themselves,” offering changes to the optics of the proletariat’s material conditions while in reality obscuring the ossification of the property structure. “The masses have a right to change property relations,” Benjamin states. “Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.” 

Building on this tradition, Spotify represents a reactionary cyber-fascism that follows from the micro-communisms of P2P networks that it contributes to stamping out. Whereas P2P networks transform capitalist property relations by disaggregating the purchaser-owner equality & redistributing the fruits of work through cyberspace (though the “work” in question is not the production of content, but the searching, archiving, uploading, etc. thereof), streaming services employ “licensing” to stage a pantomime of the anarchy that actually enables the rearrangement of property relations.

SOURCE: Mark Murphy

Typically leaders don't come up with a new change effort on a whim. I know that some pull change efforts out of thin air, but most leaders have spent weeks or months thinking about a particular issue. 

Maybe they've been studying shifts in the market all year, or they've been closely watching the evolution of new technologies or they've attended several industry conferences and noted important changes. In all those scenarios, leaders have been pondering the need for change, consciously or unconsciously, for weeks or months. 

But when they come back to the company and announce their new change effort, they typically neglect to share the intellectual journey they've been on that led them to this epiphany and need for change. 

...assuming causal structuralism, the manifestation of any disposition will be another disposition, and the manifestation of that disposition will be another disposition, and so on ad infinitum. The buck is continually passed, and hence an adequate understanding of the nature of any property is impossible, even for an omniscient being. In other words, a causal structuralist world is unintelligible.  

Let us try to make this clear with an example. According to general relativity, mass and spacetime stand in a relationship of mutual causal interaction: mass curves spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime in turn affects the behaviour of objects with mass (as matter tends, all things being equal, to follow geodesics though spacetime). What is mass? For a causal structuralist, we know what mass is when we know what it does, i.e. when we know the way in which it curves spacetime. But to really understand what this amounts to metaphysically, as opposed to being able merely to make accurate predictions, we need to know what spacetime curvature is. What is spacetime curvature? For a causal structuralist, we understand what spacetime curvature is only when we know what it does, which involves understanding how it affects objects with mass. But we understand this only when we know what mass is. 

And so we find ourselves in a classic Catch 22: we can understand the nature of mass only when we know what spacetime curvature is, but we can understand the nature of spacetime curvature only when we know what mass is

Here a few key reminders for community managers planning to leverage this new Yammer product strategy:

Focus on value in your strategy: Yammer is just a tool to fulfil your strategy. Understand the value you want to create and align your plans around that value. Employees should be engaged in and aware of this alignment. Here is your chance to engage employees directly in alignment to strategic value creation.

The best engagement is action: Employee engagement is often the responsibility of employee communications or HR teams. There can be a tendency to see the challenge of employee engagement as one of better communication and employee experiences. It isn’t. Employee engagement is a tool to leverage employee’s capabilities into value creating action. Employee engagement is how you leverage discretionary effort and hidden capabilities to create surprising value. Give your employees the chance to do things to add value. Don’t just talk with them.

Employees are leaders too: Leadership engagement is deliberately vague. Leadership is work. It is not a title or a role. Any employee can lead and given the chance on Yammer they will. The higher tiers of value in the Value Maturity Model represent the distribution of leadership, change and innovation that is possible in community. Make that a part of the plan for community in your organisation.