These last few weeks have been interesting and have me more untethered than usual.

There's a side of me that has been immersed in Trinidad and Tobago, where aspiring to be a gentleman farmer seems to have reached the glass ceiling created by an integrity not shared by politicians and people past and present. This is the culmination of about 9 years of effort, trying to do things not as they are done but as they should be done. And, damn me, it hasn't worked.¹

Then there is my overgrown 'save the world' gland that got me to be a participant in CARDICIS3 - regarding the enabling of rebuilding of Haiti by Haitians after the earthquake of January 12th, 2010. But the problems are deeper than that of an earthquake and the system failures preceded the actual disaster. 'Continuance', a phrase often associated with mankind's adaptation to disasters (and the misnomer 'disaster management'), is really not an option since the preceding conditions that, while endemic to the entire world, demonstrate their untenability in the extremes of Haiti. And there I am again, trying to do things not as they are done but as they should be done. And, damn me, I don't think I'll see progress there either.² The focus on treating the symptoms by creating systems that do so simply makes treating the disease more complicated, in my opinion.

In both of the above, I do not feel I can have an effect. I have weathered much in the first and that makes me leery of expending time and energy in the second, especially in a context that is so complicated by design. Bureaucracy shows disdain for change, by its very conceptual definition, and because of that the necessary simplifications for solution of problems are defied on cultural grounds.

Having read Should You Adapt When You Travel? and having traveled quite a bit myself, I agree with the article.

But I have further comment.

I don't recognize the distinction between 'authenticity' and 'adaptability' as Akila (The Road Forks) writes of. The adaptability aspect I have no problem - but the authenticity I do. Maybe it's just the wrong word for me; maybe she means 'not changing' - I believe that is what she means.

Culture is a lot like baggage. In that, I have always had the blessing of traveling lightly whereas others - such as Akila and her own examples - may carry more cultural baggage. She mentions vegetarianism as an example, and while it is a personal choice for her that choice was made more possible for her by her culture. There's nothing wrong with it. It is sort of funny how vegetarians identify eating vegetables as a lifestyle but rarely identify eating meat as a lifestyle. Akila seems above that.

But I don't have that issue. I don't have the problem of religion. Adaptation has always been easy for me because I live outside of the cultures that so many people cling to unquestioningly. And that has given me a lot of different ways to look at things.

This train of thought, thanks to Akila, got me on a train of thought that lead to what we now call tourism - which is the manufacture of a more acceptable culture for tourists so that they spend money.

While cleaning out bookmarks on my laptop, I came across this post by Trish. It brought to mind an old post of my own, Modern Gypsies, which has little to do with culture - but has everything to do with culture. People, such as Trish and myself, see things in ways that are different than most.

Take for instance a few days ago, when I was in South Oropouche. I had just come out of the 'garden' after checking on my corn when I stopped and said hello to a neighbor. He told me that he had been invited to a Hindu pooja but had no way to get there, so I took him. Along the way we piled 4 more people into the pickup, got them to where the prayers were held, wished people well (after I changed into a less sweaty shirt) and then sat to eat - customary for some poojas. So while eating, I was introduced as a surveyor from Suriname.

A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology.