My favorite part of the USRio+2.0 Conference: when Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary for ICT, points out that technology won’t save Africa if no one addresses ethical and moral issues, particularly the dangers of preaching a belief in heaven. It starts at 16:23 in the video above, and I paraphrase his statements here:
Until we address the issue of ethics and value systems, even technology will be useless because they are the crux of the problem.
What I think we need to do is talk to the preachers and the priests about how to change Africa. This is where the problem is. These are the people who are promising heaven. But heaven was supposed to be here – we were supposed to make heaven on Earth. People listening to Jim Reeves’s “This World is Not My Home” may think they can pollute Earth because they’re moving on to another world – a world which is not there, by the way.
We need to address things here. If you look at some of the founders of western world – Martin Luther, John Calvin, and most of the puritans who moved to the U.S. – they were looking at creating heaven on Earth. That makes the difference between some parts of the world and parts of the western world.
So, if we are able to convince people that god said that heaven is what we make in this world, we would give hope, and people would use less coal or at least look at renewable energy because there is no other place we would call home other than Earth.
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
Christina Cacioppo on why Cherry, an iPhone app that lets you order an an immediate car wash, is compelling:
Like Opez, Cherry enables car washers to become freelancers. They don’t need to work for a car-washing shop and so can retain more of the profits generated by their work.
Historically, one service provided by a car-washing shop has been finding, staying in touch with, and retaining customers. The internet’s made it relatively easier for anyone – from a solo car washer to a car-wash shop manager – to find and retain customers: Angie’s List, Yelp, Groupon, foursquare .. the list of tools goes on and on. (And will continue to go on and on.) A motivated individual can use these tools by himself or herself or can rely on a lighter-weight solution (like Cherry) for the heavy lifting.
We’ll see more of services supporting newly liberated workers.
Spot on. But this is a fine line to walk…
Think of your workplace. How much of what exists around you is maintenance and support for the real reason you’re there? What percentage of your day do you use the talent which makes you valuable?
Car washes and data-verification (which is what we’re seeing Mechanical Turk being used for) are low hanging fruit. These are low skill, low support tasks. If companies continue to keep their focus tight on these menial tasks, the future looks rather bleak. But once their gaze widens to more skilled work, it becomes less about businesses avoiding paying overhead and more about workers optimizing their need to be at a desk 9 hours a day.
Which leads you to reforming how salaries are structured, what health care looks like, what offices are, what a career actually is… It’s a tough nut to crack, both culturally, ethically, and technically.
I’ve been thinking about Christina’s post about Cherry for the past week and I like where Drew takes it, especially by pointing out that the ultra-democratization of labor will run up against some very interesting ethical questions.
Many of the “inefficiencies” evident in large organizations that manage low-skilled labor exist to create more humane working conditions. Salaries, access to training, access to capital goods, access to health care, et cetera aren’t just niceties or fair compensation. They help keep the populace sane.
I’m a fan of creative destruction, but we should be mindful of the stress we put upon individuals as we disrupt old sclerotic institutions (like car washes!).
Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky by Elise Bergman
Alexis Madrigal on the TechCrunch / Crunch Fund debate:
…the set of solutions to common information problems that we call journalism is coming unglued as different types of publications become possible on the Internet. …
Bias in journalism has been the default assumption forever. The journalism ethics that David Carr represents was an important invention that arose to fight pervasive bias. It didn’t just happen. It partially solved the trustworthiness problem, at least temporarily.
Philip Greenspun on how the Web and the Weblog has changed writing:
In the 1980s Steve Ward, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, described a sure-fire dieting scheme. “All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.”
Steve’s diet is probably more effective than most popular diets. How come he isn’t a bestselling diet book author? How do you turn an idea that can be explained in one paragraph into a diet book that people will buy? Printing that one paragraph really large would take up one page.
Yes, this is ancient history by now, and no, I do not want to be a pundit, but I want to document two things I’ve been thinking about the hullabaloo about the I Had a One-Night Stand With Christine O’Donnell story that Gawker posted last week.
If the story is true, the only worrying thing it reveals about O’Donnell is that she’s a terrible judge of character. Whoever wrote it is the worst. She should have a more acute schmuck detector.
Sure, it’s kind of gross that Denton published the story just to get links (I just gave him one more!), but all the complaining about Denton’s ethics got me thinking again about Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on How David Beats Goliath—particularly this part:
Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.
…
The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.
I don’t know if people like Denton (or O’Donnell) are going to topple the establishment (i.e. win) with their brazenness. I hope they don’t. But they might, and they won’t be discouraged by lectures about their lack of ethics or responsibility.
Bonus third thought: it’s odd that members of the traditional media would complain about the Gawker story when plenty of traditional media outlets were being irresponsible by giving O’Donnell so much attention in the first place. Whatever media sin Denton committed with his story is only different from the traditional media’s sins in degree, not kind.
I'm Jed Sundwall. This is my blog, which you can follow on Tumblr or via RSS. You can talk to me on Twitter.
