What ends up happening in the world — on a very large scale — has a lot to do with what people believe will happen.
Because of network effects, if enough people start to believe in a particular outcome, their subconscious will start to shape their actions, and something like that outcome will end up emerging. That’s why it’s so important to put forth beautiful (and believable) visions of how the world can be. Conversely, that’s why fear-mongering, cynicism, and hopelessness are so dangerously toxic.
The future is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
At the moment, the negative visions seem to be winning. They are well-funded and profitable, and you see them every time you open a newspaper, turn on cable news, or visit certain websites. They greet you with sensationalism and proclamations by pundits on the right and the left about how awful people are, how bleak the future is, and how scared we all should be. This is bad medicine — it keeps people weak, afraid, and addicted. These messages are powerful, but they are also lies, and we do not need to believe them.
The future is ours to imagine. It’s up to us to put forth visions of how things are and could be. The more beautiful and believable our visions can be, the better chance they’ll have at succeeding.
The bad medicine is strong and corrupting, for it can make companies and the people who run them incredibly rich. But it’s so important not to add addictive experiences into the world. As software engineers, we need to realize we are really social engineers, and that the software we design, if it becomes successful, will have far-reaching impact on human behavior at the species level.
Try to make good medicine.
(Source: farmerandfarmer.org)
But why does it matter how software companies behave? People are free to use or not to use software. There is no coercion here — people are free to decide.
There are several reasons why software is important:
First, because of network effects, if many people use a given piece of software, it becomes more and more likely that you will use it, too. As a citizen of a global community, you will want to use the tools and platforms that allow you to connect with the rest of your tribe and your species. And since not all of us are engineers, we should be able to trust those of us who are to build us nourishing spaces and tools, in the same way we trust farmers to grow us good food and architects to build us good buildings.
Second, software is the staging ground for the future. The stakes are low right now, but they’re about to get higher.
At this moment of transition, we’re straddling the rare evolutionary threshold between two scales of existence. Darwinian evolution at the individual level is about to be transcended by another kind of evolution at the species level. The Internet is helping us wake up and see that what we really are, in addition to our individuals selves, is a network of individuals cells, composing a larger human organism. We act with individual agency, but our choices and actions (and possibly even our thoughts and our feelings) have a very real impact on the broader whole in which we exist.
Through the Internet, we are growing a species-level nervous system, capable of transmitting thoughts, ideas, and information, but also physiological reactions and empathy. This latter phenomenon is new, and we’ve only glimpsed it briefly several times at scale. For instance, when a young Occupy Wall Street protestor waspepper-sprayed by police at UC Davis, within a few minutes, millions of people around the world had seen the video. And many of them not only saw the video and felt a kind of moral outrage, but they also felt a kind of physical nausea — a visceral sense of pain and disgust, deep in their gut. And that part is new. It’s like those millions of viewers shared a simultaneous and collective wince in response to an external stimulus affecting another human being on the other side of the world. It’s as though the nervous systems of those millions of people were temporarily connected to the nervous system of the pepper-sprayed-girl, causing them to share her pain. It was only a glimmer, and it only lasted briefly, but it was prophetic of what is to come.
Soon, through the Internet, we are likely to fulfill the ancient Buddhist idea of experiencing the suffering of all living things.
As long as the Internet is external to us, it will be easy enough to turn off. But it’s likely that soon, we will begin to augment our human bodies with technological components that give us direct biological access to the network.
There is already precedent for technological augmentation of the human body (pacemakers, prosthetics, etc.) so it’s only a matter of time before we start accepting more and more technology into our bodies. We will soon embed wifi-enabled devices into our skin to monitor biometric signs and sync with digital health records. We’ll embed cancer-fighting nanobots that swim through our bloodstream, keeping us clean. We’ll embed micro-processors into our brains to provide direct access to the Internet through thought. At that point, the stage will be set for a kind of universal empathy — body to body, brain to brain, heart to heart, connecting the whole human species.
This may all sound far-fetched and sci-fi, but I mention it here to suggest what comes after software. And to show that even though the stakes are low right now (with apps and social networks), we are establishing the ethics and cultural norms that underlie how we build technology, and these precedents will affect how designers and developers behave in the years ahead, when the technological interventions will enter our physical bodies, and will be much harder to ignore.
Software is the staging ground for the future, affording us the time and space to get our ethics right, before the stakes are raised.
Because, the way these biological interventions will happen is that there will be some guy who starts a company, and he will have a small design team, and they will make certain choices, and decisions around things like default settings, and they will build their product, and release it into the world, and early adopters will adopt it, and then ordinary folks will try it too, and soon thereafter the physical bodies of millions of people will forever be augmented by the flippant choices made on a Tuesday afternoon in a little sunny room in Palo Alto.
Then technology really will be a drug. Let’s just hope that those designers get their ethics right.
(Source: farmerandfarmer.org)
“All technology extends some pre-existing human urge or condition: a hammer extends the hand, a pencil extends the mind, a piano extends the voice. All technology amplifies something we already possess.” — The Farmer & Farmer Review . Modern Medicine . Urges & Outcomes
“The most elegantly crafted tools are those where the purpose of the tool aligns with the purpose of its builder. So the key to building great technologies is to first find your purpose. And you will not find it by polling your users.” — The Farmer & Farmer Review . Mastery and Mimicry . The Heart of the Builder
“The most powerful qualities of nature are those where we don’t yet understand the apparatus. We don’t fully understand nature’s wisdom, her purpose, her intuition, her connection. But we can mimic these qualities without understanding their mechanisms, because they parallel the qualities of the heart.” — The Farmer & Farmer Review . Mastery and Mimicry . The Nature of Computer Programming
The great scientists of Ancient Persia were also artists. Omar Khayyam was an astronomer and a poet, Ibn Sina was a medical scientist and a poet, and Shaykh-i Baha’i was a mathematician and an architect.
Today we see this less. Artists are mostly artists, and scientists are mostly scientists. And generally, our technologies derive from science. Since science aligns with the head, and art aligns with the heart, understanding the heart and the head helps us to understand our modern technologies.
Our heads cultivate reason. Our hearts cultivate intuition.
Our heads seek opportunity. Our hearts seek purpose.
Our heads maximize utility. Our hearts give gifts.
Our heads think of self. Our hearts feel connection.
Today, our technologies reflect reason and utility and opportunity and self. But this may be an artifact of our time. We could equally imagine building technologies that reflect intuition and purpose and gift and connection. I might say we’re already starting.
(Source: farmerandfarmer.org)
“…I’m reminded of an older couple, where both partners have their quirks, but each knows how far to go, when to pull back, and what to tolerate; where each knows the other so well, and is so dependent on the other, that it’s hard to tell where one person stops and where the other begins.
The relationship between us and our tools is newer, like a younger love. It’s fiery and exciting, and we’re still trying to figure out our boundaries.
Our tools, like most things, have natural limits to their utility. Up to a certain point, e-mail makes us more efficient. After that, the mounds of e-mail in our inbox take time away from our real work. Up to a certain point, time spent on social networks brings us closer to our friends. After that, it takes away from time we spend with them in person.
Our bacteria can offer us some wisdom here. If we want tools that respect their natural limits, we can design limitation into the tools themselves.
If the idea of self-limiting tools seems antithetical to technology and capitalism, let me suggest that we already build them. A search engine is a self-limiting tool. As is an online dating site. When these tools succeed, people leave the site. Video games and TVs, on the other hand, are self-reinforcing. Their use doesn’t lead to disuse; their use leads to more use. “
(Source: farmerandfarmer.org)
“The relationship between money and happiness is surprisingly weak, which may stem in part from the way people spend it. Drawing on empirical research, we propose eight principles designed to help consumers get more happiness for their money. Specifically, we suggest that consumers should (1) buy more experiences and fewer material goods; (2) use their money to benefit others rather than themselves; (3) buy many small pleasures rather than fewer large ones; (4) eschew extended warranties and other forms of overpriced insurance; (5) delay consumption; (6) consider how peripheral features of their purchases may affect their day-to-day lives; (7) beware of comparison shopping; and (8) pay close attention to the happiness of others.” —
If money doesn’t make you happy, then you probably aren’t spending it right - Journal of Consumer Psychology 21
(Source: wjh.harvard.edu)
risa soup and josey baker bread - powered by good eggs (Taken with instagram)
“[Our] mission is to actively participate in the creation of a more sustainable food model and an agrarian culture that restores, conserves, and maintains the productivity of our landscapes and the health of its inhabitants. To accomplish this we focus on the production of local, pasture based food to feed our Bay Area communities. We align our production by mimicking natural processes on the landscape that are holistic, connected, and understanding of key resource principles. We contend that fostering a stable and fully functioning ecosystem will lead to long term viability and a more sustainable future for all life.” — Marin Sun Farms