Listening to the radio in your head

Some of my blogging friends are pretty serious about their meditation - I'm thinking of Nick and Dan, in particular - whereas I am a complete beginner. Our office is round the corner from London's Buddhist Village and Pete, our Chief Technology Officer, has been encouraging other members of the School of Everything team to come along with him to lunchtime meditation a couple of days a week. Today was my second time - and I definitely have a long way to go.

The first time I went, I was quite nervous beforehand, but really enjoyed it. Today was harder - I struggled to focus, even for a few moments, partly because I kept thinking about something the teacher had said at the beginning of the session. The meditation we were doing was the Mindfulness of Breathing, and he was talking about avoiding thinking about one thing whilst doing another. "For example," he said, "I try not to listen to the radio while I'm washing the dishes, because then my mind would be elsewhere."

I grew up in a home where the radio was nearly always on and the habit stuck. A housemate in my early 20s, when I was less well domesticated, once famously ended a rant to another housemate about my misdeeds with "...and he listens to Radio 4 in the bath!" I even had a career as a radio journalist for a while (you can hear the evidence on the Internet Archive...). And, where I can happily live without TV, I've always thought of radio as mind-expanding.

Then I remembered a metaphor I used to use during my summers selling books door-to-door as a student. It was the toughest job most of us would ever do, not least in terms of the mental and emotional strain, and I learned a lot about mental self-discipline along the way. Training other students for their first summer knocking doors, I used to encourage them to tune in to the radio in their heads and listen to the things they were saying to themselves all day. "There are things you say to yourself," I told them, "which if anyone else said to you, you'd probably punch them."

The trouble is, I was remembering all this instead of concentrating on my breathing, which doesn't say a great deal for my mental self-discipline these days. But it did all make me more curious about developing mindfulness - and I'd be interested to hear more from those of you who have more experience of meditation. I'm so used to my mind being full of words and ideas and a constant stream of connections, much of the time very enjoyably so, that I find it a real challenge to get out of my head, as it were. Also, I'm curious about where the limits to mindfulness might lie - is it really better to wash up mindfully than to do it absent-mindedly while listening to Melvin Bragg talk about Charles Darwin?

What I do know is that I could definitely benefit from becoming more mindful, so I'll be persisting with the lunchtime sessions. And I'm looking forward to Vinay's workshop on Meditation and Magic tomorrow at the Temporary School of Thought.

"The world wasn't made to be bettered..." Discuss.

Whenever I catch myself pronouncing in self-important tones on the state of the world - in other words, about three times a week - I should really go back and re-read this passage from one of Herman Hesse's pamphlets:

Friends, we must learn to desist from judging whether the world is good or bad, and we must forgo the strange pretension that it is up to us to better it.

The world has often been denounced as bad, because the denouncer had slept badly or had too much to eat. The world has often been praised as a paradise, because the praiser had just kissed a girl.

The world wasn't made to be bettered. Nor were you made to be bettered. You were made to be yourselves.

That's from Zarathustra's Return, first published anonymously in 1919, when "world betterment" was apparently something of a buzzword. I found it in a collection of his anti-war writings, 'If This War Goes On', picked up from a bookswap in a backpackers hostel years ago. Since then, two copies of the book have slipped through my fingers, but I just discovered that you can download the full text via this site - together with those of thirteen of Hesse's other works.

What's struck me lately is how difficult and/or irrelevant it seems to talk about the changes currently going on in terms of things getting better or worse. Today, for example, Ran Prieur reposted an article suggesting "the only way to save the economy is to stop printing money and allow defaults on all the bad debts. Of course the owners of debt will never agree to that, and the big money economy will crash and burn. I'm not sure that's a bad thing."

Meanwhile, my colleague Paul had a nice piece on the Guardian's PDA blog, talking about how the internet industry is changing:

My prediction for 2009 is that startups that matter will matter more. By 'matter', I mean the ones which have an explicit goal to improve the world whether that's socially or environmentally... The outlook for 2009 if you're trying to change the world is pretty good. If you're trying to get people to throw virtual sheep at each other, it's going to be a lot tougher than 2008.

I'm closer to Hesse when it comes to talk of "improving the world", but I do think that we're living in a time that is full of possibilities, and where precisely the events which are presented as the end of the world as we know it can open up a space for hope.

Back (and looking forwards)

Gosh, is it 2009 already? As you might have noticed, this blog went a bit Trappist for the last few months. I've been busy with School of Everything, as well as editing magazines and generally dealing with life stuff. But I'm back - and looking forward to a year which I suspect will be less about changing the world, more about keeping up with the speed at which the world is changing...

If so, yesterday was a good start. I spent a fascinating evening hanging out with Josef Davies-Coates, a one-man serendipity machine and digital Johnny Appleseed (planting world-changing videos and PDFs from his portable hard drive), and Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the Hexayurt, who advises the Pentagon and anarchist squatters alike on how to build autonomous, open source infrastructures. (Last night was inspiring on plenty of levels - not least, it inspired me to make more use of my Twitter, since that was how our meet-up came about.)

Vinay's blogged a bit more about our conversation. If you're in London and free on Wednesday afternoon, I highly recommend coming down to the workshops he's running at the Temporary School of Thought, a week-long Free School event at the most palatial squat I've ever visited. (Think gilded mirrors, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper and a Sound of Music staircase, then add dry rot and a gang of enthusiastic artists and activists.) I'll be there on Wednesday - and also on Saturday afternoon, when I'm giving a talk about Ivan Illich and 'Deschooling Society'. (There's a full timetable here.)

Plenty of other exciting things coming up - not least, the publication of Collaborative Cultures: COMMONSense, which I gather should be out later this month. (Oh, and if you read Spanish, there's an interview with me in the New Media section of this Mexican magazine.)

Call for submissions - COMMONSense

*** We've now extended the deadline for submissions till 17th October - so there's still time to contribute... ***

I fear this blog is starting to gather dust. Sorry about that! It has been a busy and exciting time - not least with the official launch of School of Everything and us getting boingboinged!

On the off-chance that anyone has been missing my ramblings, you might want to check out the post I wrote for the Everything blog last week - How I stopped worrying and learned to love the market!

Meanwhile, I'm editing a little magazine for Access Space in Sheffield - and looking for contributions from around the world on the theme of COMMONSense. Here's the details - do pass them on, as appropriate:

Collaborative Cultures // COMMONSense

A call for submissions

Access Space in Sheffield is seeking contributions for a magazine to be published this autumn. The issue will reflect a theme which connects the activities of Access Space to the wider world.

The theme of the issue is COMMONSense. Not so long ago, the only people who talked about "the commons" were historians; today, the language of the commons is central to debates around intellectual property, environmental protection, and resistance to globalisation. These international debates find their echoes here in South Yorkshire - in the activities of Access Space, recycling waste technology and promoting Open Source software, or in Grow Sheffield's efforts to build local food networks and seed city centre wasteland. Can talk of "the commons" help us find common ground between these kinds of projects? Does using the same words mean we've found a common language - or can it disguise different meanings and intentions?

We're looking for pieces of COMMONSense: prose (stories, thoughts, book reviews, bibliographies...), poetry, songs, pieces of code, photographs, cartoons, drawings, graphics or anything else you can think of. These might approach the theme in relation to green issues, land ownership, social relations, the internet, the music industry, copyright, software, or anything else that makes sense to you.

The format of the magazine means that each contribution will take up a single A5 page. With that in mind, we're looking for the following:

* written texts of up to 200 words
* or poems of up to 20 lines
* or black and white drawings, cartoons, photos or other graphics

Images should be at least 300 dpi and in JPEG, PNG or TIFF format.
Texts should be in TXT, ODT or DOC format.
We ask that your contributions be made available to us under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/ ) The magazine will be freely accessable from the web.
Although we cannot pay for contributions, there will be a limited print edition and each contributor will receive a free copy.

The deadline for submissions is 26 September 2008 [EXTENDED TO 17 OCTOBER 2008]
Please send your contribution by email to collaborativecultures@googlemail.com
Attachments should be no more than 6 Mb.

The magazine will be edited by Dougald Hine and the creative direction will be by artist Anne-Marie Culhane.

It will be launched at Access Space during the Off The Shelf literary festival on 24 October 2008

Contact us at collaborativecultures@googlemail.com

www.access-space.org/ccs

Commonsense

Heretical thoughts...

When you read a story like this, does it give you hope - or does it make your heart sink?

A liquid fuel made from plants that is chemically identical to crude oil but which does not contribute to climate change when it is burned or, unlike other biofuels, need agricultural land to produce sounds too good to be true. But a company in San Diego claims to have developed exactly that – a sustainable version of oil it calls "green crude"...

For the purposes of argument, let's suspend scepticism about journalistic hype - and imagine that a technical breakthrough could allow us to continue living today's lifestyles at a "sustainable" level of CO2 emissions.

Frankly, such a prospect makes my heart sink - in a way which could only confirm the worst suspicions held by the likes of Spiked Online about the Green movement and its hidden agendas. There's a kind of truth in those suspicions: environmentalism that justifies itself in terms of scientific necessity is often underpinned by deeper convictions about the unsatisfactoriness of our ways of living.

It would be better if more of us were clear about such convictions. If we don't make the argument, we will find ourselves hostages to a version of "sustainability" which insists on attempting to sustain our current way of living at all costs. Among those costs may be:

• The cost of going down in flames, because it turns out that this way of living couldn't be sustained - when we might have found other ways of living.
• In the event that serious action at national and international level does achieve massive emissions reductions, the cost to our freedom of state-controlled attempts to maximise economic productivity within ecological limits.
• Finally, in the unlikely event that a technical breakthrough saves the day, the cost of the lesson not learned. Even if we could "fix" climate change, without a change to our approach to our surroundings and our activities, we would sooner or later hit up against an even more intractable problem.

Is the answer to stop talking about climate change - and talk instead about the deeper political and ethical problems with our ways of living?

Print on Demand Conundrum

So here's a question. In the name of research, I spend a lot of time either reading articles online or printing them out to read offline. Since I spend too much of my life staring at screens, I'd rather read them offline - but stapled-together printouts aren't a great format, either, particularly for longer articles. This afternoon, I thought: what if I could use a print-on-demand service to have whole sets of articles bound as one-off books for my use?

Now, the copyright status of these articles varies, but all have been freely published online - often in PDF or on sites which offer a "Print" version with most of the non-text content stripped out. So they have been made available for me to print a personal copy. If I compile a PDF of a dozen articles and order a single copy of it from a print-on-demand service, bound as a paperback, it doesn't feel like I'd be crossing a line in terms of my use of the material. But I suspect the print-on-demand provider wouldn't see it as acceptable use of their service.

Any thoughts, anyone?

Scientific, Post-Modern Secular Materialism...

(Thanks to Tom!)

Three Bodies Boiled for the Price of Two

In any place and time, the customs surrounding death say a lot about people's shared beliefs. Do I mean 'beliefs'? What I have in mind is not the consciously-chosen or stubbornly-clung-to position which that word may suggest. Rather, these customs reveal the deeper fabric of assumptions, usually taken for granted, which make up our understanding of reality.

What prompted this thought was a report in yesterday's Independent on Sunday that the British government is "considering radical solutions for disposing of the dead":

With options shrinking, the Government has turned its attention to the possibility of "boiling" bodies down to a handful of dust.

What I found most revealing was a comment from the company promoting this technique. Sandy Sullivan, managing director of Water Resomation Ltd, told the paper:

Cremation takes up to two hours to dispose of one body. We think we can do it in two hours, but we are telling people we can do it in three hours. Anything better than that will be a bonus – it would amount to three for the price of two.

What times we live in.

Money for Everything

A year ago, School of Everything was still basically a group of friends kicking an idea around. Today, we took an important step closer to making that idea a reality, as we announced that we've succeeded in raising the angel investment we've been looking for. As Paul (who's led our fundraising) says, it's been quite an adventure:

There are all kinds of funny stories associated with our hunt for the right investors. 10 Downing Street, wearing the wrong kind of trousers, facebook stalking and a tank just for starters. I can’t begin to tell you how much we’ve learned. The overall lesson for me though is that if you have a good idea, a good team and can show you’re serious about making the idea reality, there’s no shortage of people willing to back you.

We're all really excited, not just about the money, but about the people and organisations who have chosen to invest. It feels like we've found a group of backers who share the values behind what we're doing. JP Rangaswami, one of our investors and our new chairman, writes:

Since 1987, the only stakes I’ve held have been in the companies I worked for, and they’ve been acquired while I worked for them. That’s been a Rule for me.

Rules, however, are proven by exception. And I’ve made an exception.

School of Everything...

I have a passion for education, in many forms and shapes. One of my goals in life has always been to set up a school, from scratch...

I met the founders many months ago, and they have a passion about them, an excitement about them, an excitement that bodes well for the future.

The other investors are Esther Dyson, Rocco Pelligrenelli, and the educational wing of UK broadcaster Channel 4 - as well as the Young Foundation, who've supported us from the earliest stages.

I never planned on being an entrepreneur. I was writing a book about my own and other people's attempts to change the world - or at least avoid getting a proper job. Then one of those attempts took on a life of its own. I still can't quite take it seriously when I see myself listed as a "Chief Strategy Officer" - but I'm convinced that School of Everything matters and that I've got an important part to play in making it happen.

Now we have to get on with spreading the word and developing the community of people learning and teaching through the site.

Recommended Listening

Somebody I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog is Dean Bavington, one of the friends I made in Mexico at last December's Illich colloquium. It was an amazing week, bringing together a bunch of thinkers from around the world who are working in Illich's tradition, as well as a mixture of Mexican students, activists and friends of the man himself.

With such a gathering, there's always the potential for people to be talking at crossed purposes or over each other's heads, but the one talk which really seemed to cross the barriers of language and culture was Dean's. When he spoke of the collapse of the Newfoundland cod fishery, he drew on all his academic discipline and insight, but he did so to tell the story of the place where he grew up and its people. As he spoke, he passed a cod jigger out into the audience, so that each of us could feel the cold weight of the object at the centre of his story.

I wish I could hand that weight to you - or even pass on a recording which caught a little of the atmosphere in the room that evening. Failing that, though, I was delighted to get an email from Dean a couple of weeks ago alerting me to a programme David Cayley had made with him for CBC, in which he tells much of the story. You can get a podcast of it here.

The interview, done several months before the colloquium, doesn't quite reach the emotional depth of the story as I heard it in Cuernavaca - but it is a great piece of radio, nonetheless. And it reminded me how much I look forward to getting to hang out with Dean again some time soon.

Worse than Patriotism

On today's anniversary, I want to share a passage which I read around the time of the invasion of Iraq and which has stayed with me over the five years since. I don't agree with it all or claim that it is all relevant, but at its heart is a distinction which pinpoints what made Tony Blair's justification of the war so repulsive. What makes this more striking is that the book from which it is taken was first published in 1960:

Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for 'their country' they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their country's cause was just; but it was still their country's cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds - wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine - I become insufferable. The pretence that when England's cause is just we are on England's side - as some neutral Don Quixote might be - for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it.

The author is CS Lewis, the book 'The Four Loves'. I am not sure that I can resign myself to the necessity of war or patriotism, but I suspect that Lewis is right when he says that what has replaced patriotism is worse. In the case of Iraq, Britain did not need to defend itself, but nor was the decision to join the invasion made without self-interest. The pious justifications were, indeed, insufferable.

School of Everywhere!

I've been really grateful for all the enthusiasm from regular readers for my work on School of Everything - the internet startup I started with friends in late 2006. If this blog has gone a bit quiet lately, it is because things are really getting busy over there. And today we've got some news: schoolofeverything.com is now officially global!

Until yesterday, you could only show up on the map if you were based in the UK - but last night, my colleague Paul Miller presented at the NY Tech Meetup. To coincide with this, we were able to open up the site to teachers around the world. Already, we have teachers in New York, Montreal, Berlin and San Francisco (hi, Nick!).

There's still loads we want to do to finetune things and make the site truly global, but we know there are already people connecting with each other and meeting up as a result of using it. And we've got work underway to take us closer to the vision that drove us to start this:

Our current education system was designed in the industrial revolution to prepare people for factory work. The world has changed a lot since then - and the time has come to rethink education from the bottom to the top.

At School of Everything, we believe that learning is personal, and starts not with what you 'should' learn but with what you're interested in. So we're building a tool to help anyone in the world learn what they want, when, where and in a way which suits them. Putting people in touch with each other, not with institutions.

This isn't about e-learning. There are lots of great online tools, but not much beats being in a room with someone who wants to teach you the thing you want to learn...

Read the rest here.

The most helpful thing for us at the moment is to have people using the site and telling us what would make it more useful for them. So if you know anyone with skills or knowledge that they would enjoy passing on, whether as a paid teacher or just for the love of it, do tell them what we're up to. And keep sending me your thoughts and ideas for directions we might go or people and projects with similar values.

I will try to get back to some regular blogging soon - and Anirudh, I'm aware I owe you a post about liberalism.