lxpk's blog

This morning I awake from the most vivid rabbit hole. Have I awoken?

The bee flies free from Alex Peake on Vimeo.

 

In the dream I'm an actor on a vast soundstage of familiar scenes remembered and imagined. I walk into the position masked out with tape.

"Roll sound! Speed. Roll camera! Rolling."

Slate crashes down.

"Frame! Action!"

I play myself in a movie about my life. But it is not my life as it has already happened, it is my life as I see it happening next. I don't re-enact retraced steps, I pre-enact steps towards what I trust in my heart must be done.

Mind you, I've acted in Hollywood science fiction films before, but this one is different. This is science factual. It has the smell of things that will come to pass. If the movie had a poster, the title would be "The Empowerment" and the "subtitle would be, "The future won't be denied."

I attended 2013: What Comes Next with Daniel Pinchbeck (author of 2012 and Breaking Open The Head) and a panel of mostly excellent speakers.

Cooper joined me and did his first Cimmerian duty shoot a brief interview I did with Daniel Pinchbeck. I asked him an important question.

Video coming soon. 

Also, need to get Daniel copy of The Diamond Age.

Idea I'm working on: One-man army book clubbing. Get 5 of your favorite important book and circulate it amongst everyone you know who needs it.

Must talk to Graham about rebooting Mind Bombs!

Talking like Rorschach. Wow.

Great event and they launched a new social network for transformation called evolver.net. Check it out!

 

Bandcamp is barcamp for musicians and we're not the first to think of it.

Bandcamp is an idea some other people from Caroline Collective coworking space have already begun in their own way.

http://carolinecollective.cc/
http://barcamp.org/BandCamp

Here's their intro:

What is BandCamp About? Music, Musicians, Artists, Bands, marketing and promoting your band, booking a tour, dos and don'ts, selling your music online/offline, old guard vs new guard, etc.

There are several goals to Bandcamp. First, to deliver tools to Houston musical artists that will allow them to more effectively practice their craft. Second, to open lines of communication between all members and levels of the Houston Music Community. Finally, it is our goal to cohere and direct the Houston music community towards a path that will allow us to gain national recognition for the talent and expertise of the musicians and genres sprouting up and fostered in Houston.

2009 Birthday State of the Empowerment: Announcing Stores & Comics

March 18, Pescadrome, Santa Barbara: Alex gave his first Birthday State of the Empowerment talk to announce Empowerment's first retail stores, preview upcoming comics and explain the spacepunk movement behind it all. Then he wrote a blog post about himself in the third person and this fourth wall-shattering sentence.

My mind is perpetually processing permutations of possible nonmenclatures for Empowerment. I have so many concepts to develop with so many potential naming conventions that I need to blog about it to keep it all straight.

Thyself is problematic

Empower Thyself is problematic because it sounds cultish and pushy. Thyself has to go. It can remain a slogan, like Apathy Is Obsolete and Empower Humanity.

Fearful Symmetry

One aspect of the logo I want to preserve is symmetry.

BeEmpowered is symmetrical with the Ω O in the middle of the word which I like, but there is already taken by a christian ministry with sweet graphics. http://beempowered.com/

I think the core name has to be just Empower, Empowered or Empowerment. 

The non-profit wil be called Empower Humanity.

The for-profit will be called Empower, Inc..

Domain Names

The trouble is that most of the domains I want are taken.

I think I should switch to empowerment.tv for the main domain name until such time as I can get empowerment.com from the squatter who has it. That will take luck or money.

Empowerpedia.com is squatted.

But Empowerpedia.org is not! Got it.

The comics of the future are already here, they're just not widely distributed yet.

Comic books are blowing up in the mainstream consciousness. Many of the biggest action flicks these days are comic adaptations, and comics have earned serious respect as an art form. But like video games and other popular entertainment media, comic books still have a frontier to conquer.

The challenge for entertainment is to go beyond merely telling stories that take us away from it all. The opportunity now exists for art to inspire life and for entertainment to become empowerment. People today are hungry for inspiration to find ways to do something with their lives, and often times it is a story that opens their eyes to a path they want to follow.

Books, movies and games have the power to launch a thousand careers. Movies about pirate radio like Pump Up The Volume have inspired Internet radio movements like Rant Media. Books like 1984 led many to become activists and champions of freedom. Games like America's Army show the ultimate synthesis of entertainment and recruitment by actually simulating a career path and offering players a job.

If America's Army can be a hugely successful recruiting tool convincing youth to try one of the most dangerous and challenging jobs, surely entertainment could inspire young people to try doing something fun and creative with their lives?

I think comic books are up to this challenge. And I'm already seeing two trends in the right direction: Science comics and real heroes that matter.

Science Comics

Who knew there were comics about space exploration, environmentalism and historical biographies!

43 Things is inspiring to our Missionpedia project.

They've got a terrific book out and a whole ton of tips about the importance of using life lists to live a richer life.

http://www.43things.com/book/guide

Should Do This is cool (http://www.shoulddothis.com/about/first_time_visitor ) because you can suggest things.

This is analogous to our suggestion mission feature and we should integrate a big suggestion box feature like this.

Their 43 People ( http://www.43people.com/ ) is similar to our planned Peoplepedia.

The thing is, theirs is sort of wide open with no explcit linkage between all these elements, whereas we intend to integrate all these things towards empowerment and to link it all through Facebook and OpenSocial as the connective tissue.

Their stuff works through very dynamic folksonomy node creation, which would be great to achieve with some new code for handling urls that don't exist like wikis should.

Someone did a usability community analysis of 43 Things that is very interesting: http://www.unc.edu/~mchabib/43things/index.html

They concluded that 43 Things is more of a society than a community bcause it is more about the benefit of individual members rather than the benefit of the community group. More about doing than cheering essentially.

This OLPC video really speaks to the heart of the potential of young people the world over waiting to be given the chance to be all they can be. We should work towards making child-friendly content and experiences for OLPC and other small child laptop users.

Today William Gibson met his thought child for the first time. Bill signed the EmpowerThyself "new glory" banner that has been Iwo Jimad at every Barcamp and Empowerment office from LA to SF to DC. It only took me six years to figure out what to say to him.

When I first met Bill I was reading his books and beginning to write and develop the ideas that became Empowerment. I used to see him at the Vancouver Bread Garden on 16th and Granville where I lived. I was in awe of the man. I introduced myself once but at the time I didn't know where to begin to explain the ideas growing into Empowerment from the seeds he had planted in my mind.

The Empowerment is directly inspired by Neuromancer and the whole cyberpunk movement. 'Cybernetic' means steering yourself and 'punk' means steering against the flow so to me cyberpunk is about shaping yourself and shaping the future.

That is what Gibson inspired us all to do, and that is what we are now doing. Cyberpunk science fiction has become cyberpunk non-fiction.

By the next time I see him (hopefully at Rant's 10th Anniversary in Vancouver if he has time to accept my invitation) I will have a more concrete finished system to show him and the Wog cyberpunk community as a whole.

If Empowerment is Bill's memetic baby, this was more of a sonogram than a meeting, and it is time for the team to give birth. Remember:

"Great artists ship!"

 

http://sf0.org/tasks/

 

http://akoha.com/

We've just moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and we're hunting for a new headquarters. If you know of suitable spaces from rooms to warehouses in San Francisco or Oakland, let us know.

We're currently beginning operations at the Noisebridge hacker space, which looks an awful lot like our old office: steel shelving, rolly chairs and hackers.

UPDATE: Since taking this picture a few days ago, Arram from Justin.tv on the right volunteered to help with writing and usability and J from Wikia has volunteered to help code! Noisebridge is hacker paradise and the support is really encouraging!

test by replying to this

I'm always coming across more shipping container ideas and I've recently built a platform above SLHQ for prototyping shipping container-based development of future Empowerment arcologies.

Kill Switch X-Files Episode Had A Hacker and an AI In A Box

 

A Cafe in a Shipping Container

Where there are computer programmers, there must also be caffeine. Consider the fact that the nerd store ThinkGeek has a whole section devoted to the substance. One of my favorite sayings was adapted from a line in mathematician Paul Erdos’ biography, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: “A programmer is a machine for converting caffeine into software.”

It logically follows that if there are computing centers in shipping containers, there should also be some kind of caffeine dispensers in shipping containers as well. Here come artist Adam Kalkin and fancy-pants coffee vendor Illy to the rescue:

The Washington Monument makes me think perhaps a new kind of geometric symbol would be more appropriate to symbolize empowerment.

I recently created The Activist Memorial and the Gold Star Monument as first steps towards creating symbols of empowerment culture akin to the symbols of American democracy in Washington DC like the Vietnam Memorial, Washington Monument and Reflecting Pool.

How about The Monolith? You know, the one from 2001 Space Odyssey through 3001: Final Odyssey. The late, great Arthur C. Clarke was a great innovator who gave us many high-speed ideas including geosynchronous orbiting satellites.

The Monolith symbolizes a spark of inspiration for evolution, technological advancement and space exploration.

What does a monolith look like?

• It is a tall, smooth black cuboid artifact of precisely 1:4:9 proportions (the first 3 primes squared).
• It can change size, or, in the words of Monolith experiencer David Bowman, "It has only one size: As large as necessary." 
• It can appear suddenly where it is least expected.

The monolith could form a nexus for all the other monuments around it much like the Washington Monument does in DC between the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol.

I have begun prototyping the monolith on a new platform above the current Second Life HQ.

What do you think?

by Moses Silbiger —http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/459

click here to download accompanying poster image.

Learning is at its best when it is goal-oriented, contextual, interesting, challenging, and interactive. These same winning characteristics also define the best computer games … Learning can and should be hard fun!
- Clark N. Quinn, E-learning & video game designer, and author.

We are already the most overinformed, underreflective people in the history of civilization. Is it possible the twenty-first century needs a new kind of learning and a new kind of leader to help us …? Perhaps [we can] begin building not simply an information highway but a transformation highway.
- Robert Kegan, developmental psychologist, professor, and author, Harvard University.

Introduction

As odd or paradoxical as it may seem, I envision video games being increasingly designed to facilitate human development, as virtual reality technologies continue to evolve and integrate with leading edge developmental practices.

Most of us have played a video game at least once in our lives, or at least watched somebody else play, often a close one. Can you remember what you felt when you played a video game for the first time, or watched another player deeply engaged in one? I invite you now to engage in a brief Phenomenological exploration. Try to access how you were feeling, what were your emotions about it? … Who were you at that moment? Can you identify what “self” was playing, or observing somebody else deeply immersed in the game? What were your thoughts about it? Was there something “magical” or “different” about that? Just pause a little moment and close your eyes to really access and embody that memory…

Read more... http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/show/459

In exploring Indiana we've run across some interesting spots at which to meet, eat and check out.

Indiana History Center's Stardust Terrace Cafe 450 West Ohio St.

Internets! Great atmosphere, lots of round tables, food was closed when we went but reliable Internet and awesome WWII victory posters.

Enzo's Pizza

It doesn't get any more Snow Crash than Enzo's Pizza. I forgot to ask if they do deliverations.

 

So as I mentioned before, there is now an announcement: Facebook's new simplified tabbed interface is coming next week. Try this preview link to see what it looks like in advance. I wish they had an ALL tab to show the whole profile like before and I wish there was a sort of table of contents of tabs at the top of all the boxes that let you filter to them all without scrolling.

Many people are pointing out how iPhone is a potential Gameboy DS killer. My mind is buzzing with the possibilities presented by a game platform that combines serious application interface design with entertainment.

You get both wii-style gesturing and movements AND DS-style touchscreen gameplay WITHOUT needing a pesky stylus.

And you get things no other game platform has: Always-on high-speed internet and GPS tracking EVERWHERE YOU ACTUALLY GO WITH IT.

Imagine locationally connected gameplay, altearnate reality gaming, etc...

My mind is buzzing and I think the real-world Empowerment tools on the iPhone and Facebook will become married to simulated gameplay on both platforms using almost the same interface.

Here's something an Empowerment writer contributed that is a work in progress that I want to share because the ideas and the related video is so exciting:

James Carse, in his wonderful book, Finite and Infinite Games, suggests:
There are at least two kinds of games.
One could be called finite, the other infinite.
The finite game is played for the purpose of winning,
an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play,
...and bringing as many persons as possible into the play.
Finite players play within boundaries;
infinite players play with boundaries.
Welcome to the Game of Empowerment!

You ARE already a Member of the Game! 

Twitter is a growing phenomenon for what amounts to mass public instant messaging.

Their upcoming iPhone interface is commented on here and it is relavent to our own design.

Empowerment for iPhone will be ubersimple.

I actually designed a handheld interface for Sling Technologies for their handheld parking enforcement devices based on Windows CE but I scrapped Windows' widgets in favor of large iPhone-style thumbable buttons, so my interface design was essentially an iPhone app.

I look forward to coming up with screenshots of what the iPhone UI will look like!

Ideas, anyone?

People are drowning in infotainment. "Information" that is essentially novelty-clad superficial frivolous trivia.

So many forms of information are not actionable knowledge.

Even Wikipedia is like an application program with no buttons. You can look at all the screens but it is in demo mode and you have to pay to unlock the actual features.

It is time to build a system where knowledge means knowledge of action opportunities, the what can be done and how to do it, not simply knowledge of inert, demoralizingly abstract concepts.

That's what Ideapedia, Skillpedia, Toolpedia, Mediapedia, Missionpedia and all our other projects are about: Creating actionable knowledge.

If I were to give it all a name I would call it Dopedia, because the idea and the skill which we are enabling most of all is simply doing.

A related video about drowning in information vs knowledge:

Facebook is about to add tabs at the top of profiles much like the ones that we have started implementing. Here's a screenshot. I think it suggests we're on the right track with this idea: tabs make more sense than expanding and collapsing a ton of stacked boxes.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080521/ap_on_hi_te/facebook_facelift

I have always anticipated Steve Jobs' keynotes with excitement and admired his ability as a presenter of the creative excellence that Apple produces.

It is my goal to deliver Empowerment keynotes with the greatest skill I can achieve to present the most empowering things we can offer.

I'm also quite impressed with the technical setup of Jobs' keynotes. I'm designing our Second Life HQ to have a presentation similar to a combination of an Apple Store and a WWDC Steve Jobs Keynote hall.

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/772.html

 

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/04/spy_games

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In the wake of the intelligence bungles that propelled the United States into the Iraq war, it's no secret that the nation's spies have been working to improve the quality of their analysis. Now the top U.S. military intelligence agency has come up with a new tool for teaching recruits critical thinking skills: videogames.

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has just taken delivery of three PC-based games, developed by simulation studio Visual Purple under a $2.6 million contract between the DIA and defense contractor Concurrent Technologies. The goal is to quickly train the next generation of spies to analyze complex issues like Islamic fundamentalism.

Given a choice between a droning classroom lecture or a videogame, the best method for teaching Generation Y was obvious. "It is clear that our new workforce is very comfortable with this approach," says Bruce Bennett, chief of the analysis-training branch at the DIA's Joint Military Intelligence Training Center.

Wired.com had an opportunity to play all three games, Rapid Onset, Vital Passage and Sudden Thrust. The titles may conjure images of blitzkrieg, but the games themselves are actually a surprisingly clever and occasionally surreal blend of education, humor and intellectual challenge, aimed at teaching the player how to think.

All three games put the player into the shoes of a young, eager but sometimes hapless DIA analyst.

Read the full story...

 

When we get to the stage of putting barcodes on our materials, I want them to be cool like these.

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/04/japanese-creative-pa.html

Creative Japanese packaging designers at D-Barcode have come up with delightful ways of incorporating the UPC bar-codes into their products. Link, Link to Dark Roasted Blend roundup of creative barcodes (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Oprah is featuring Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth chapter-by-chapter in video seminars. I even found links to it in the "empowering" section of a women's fashion web site. Tolle's ideas are really interesting.

I just met author Bret Hughes at the Infoshop and he is a really interesting fellow with an excellent book called "Wisdom In Perspective" that you can read on Google Books.

It reminds me of Barbara Marx Hubbard's conscious evolution, another Santa Barbara local. Methinks the three of us should meet up some time and brainstorm how we might work together to advance our shared ideas.

 I think iPhone apps could provide really powerful empowering augmented intelligence tools in the field. We use augmented intelligence tools every day: calendars, to-dos and sticky notes are all ways of augmenting our intelligence by reminding ourselves of things we've written down. Professionals such as doctors already use mobile apps to help them do their jobs by giving them quick access to their huge databases of medical information for things like medicine recognition and diagnosis. Apple is proposing a fitness system for the iPhone that helps you plan and execute exercises to meet your fitness goals. Instead of having an abstract wishy washy conception of what you ought to be doing in your head that you may or not follow, an augmented intelligence system gives you step-by-step suggestions to spur you onwards to next step after next step.

Empowerment for iPhone could do much more in my daily life than an EmpowerThyself web site that requires me to interrupt my day to use a computer. Let's just call it iPower for a second (I looked up other uses of iPower and there's a really cool iPower philosophy of activism being promoted through YouTube videos. I should learn more and contact them!). iPower could be with you throughout your day. You could use this to think of things to do and to get help doing things.

Any time you wanted to do something useful you could use iPower to see your mission list of things to do, skills to learn and tools to obtain. For example, I have some free time and I see I have a mission to learn to drive manual that requires a car and a teacher. I have both my car and my buddy Dave to teach me, so I begin that mission and I'm on my way to learning a new skill and accomplishing a goal.

When working on a mission you could use iPower to reference all your skills, ideas and tools to learn and review what you already learned to help you get things done. For example, I could review the Driving Manual skill to get some tips and watch some youtube videos so that I know about the basics before I start getting direct experience with my teacher in the car.

The implementation of an iPhone app could start simply by making a custom theme with a vastly simplified iPhone-style web app interface that would show just a single menu or info panel on the screen at a time with rapid sliding between screens.

Once we got the tools working reasonably well through the browser, it would be more powerful to develop a native iPower application. The native app would have the advantage of bein faster, using less battery power, and working when Internet access wasn't available, such as with an iPod Touch. It would sync back with EmpowerThyself.com all the changes the doer and the site made between syncing.

 
A newly published patent application reveals that Apple has been exploring the possibility of expanding their Nike + iPod sport kit into a full fledged fitness system.

The first segment of the interview process would poll the user on their fitness goals, desired activity level (moderate, advanced), fitness interests (such as jogging, pilates, and swimming), fitness goals (lose weight, firm and tone, and get back into shape), weight goals, desired workout schedule, and so forth.
....
Once the interview process is completed, the computer-based application would create a profile of the user and a workout regiment based around their feedback on goals and fitness interests. For instance, a user interested in weight training would be provided a work out schedule broken down into warmup cardio exercises and a weight training session comprised of sets, reps and weight levels.

The iPod or iPhone would then guide the user through their training, with the possibility of adding additional hardware sensors to track progress.

—http://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/27/apple-digital-fitness-companion-system/

 

My friend Jonah asked me if I had heard of http://www.antiapathy.org and looking at their very cool site led me to a site that tracks how many times people do a list of 100 suggested actions. Their #1 action is one that I also think is easy to promote far and wide: reusable shopping bags.

http://www.wearewhatwedo.org/actiontracker/action.php?action=1#vote

http://bestuff.com/stuff/internet

I like the way the categories on the right expand automatically. It reminds me of stuff Apple has been doing on their pages with sidebar boxes.