Our relationships exist in multidimensional spheres. To get there from here and further, we should probably get rid of some misconceptions.

Getting Grounded In The Sphere

A belief in institutions did not bring mankind committees, churches, governments, unions and other things. A belief in institutions did not bring mankind health-care, spaceflight, commercial flight and the Internet. This belief in institutions did not bring us an economy based on markets. This belief in institutions did not make democracy the least wrong system of government on Spaceship Earth. This belief in institutions did not give us the modern multinational corporation.

This belief also didn't give us the Public Domain, Copyright, Patents and prosecuting children for sharing. This belief didn't make invading countries by getting 'public opinion' swayed a good thing.

There is no belief in institutions. The belief that makes us do these things is a belief that if we work together we can do things greater than if we had acted individually. The belief in institutions is that for a relationship to be worthwhile it must be permanent and must never change. 'Bureaucracy protects', says the old wisdom.

Change is uncomfortable, unsettling and unavoidable. It haunts us every morning in the mirror more and more as we become older. Where once a young man might celebrate a single hair on the chin, he might later reflect on that and remember the happiness while staring at a sea of grey swimming around the islands of black - maybe that makes change more painful as we grow older. No one really knows.

The uncomfortable reality is that, despite our best efforts, things change and it seems that they are constantly changing faster than our institutions can accommodate.

The future is made up of realities and choices, and at any given time there are many pathways to it. The choices include the people around you, the actions that you take with them and the actions they take with you - as well as the interactions of the whole mess of that with the realities of the environment as seen by everyone involved... even those not in the 'network'.

Last week I lost a friend who I had known only for a year. He didn't use Twitter or Facebook; he started off herding cows and built a multi-million dollar automotive-related business from there based on risk-taking, sound decisions and most of all - hard work. You could eat on his reputation. In fact, many did due to his generosity. So after losing him last week, knowing that the world was a lesser place without him and also knowing that pathways had closed I considered it all very deeply.

When I posted on it on Facebook, I got messages of support. But no one knew this person, and it almost seems like sacrilege to write about him on these sites because he was more real than the majority of people who follow my doings here, there, or anywhere. When all my other real friends became distant - perhaps because I began to get dirt under my fingernails (how distasteful!) and being as hands on as I usually am while damning the pseudo-aristocracy, this friend was someone who wanted nothing from me. I wanted nothing from him. For both of us in that environment - in this environment - that is a luxury. In a world where people beat on our doors because we're sympathetic and casually empathetic, we allowed ourselves the abuses and pointed out that our weaknesses and strengths were synonymous. While we gave, we never took for nothing and we never leeched others to get what we have or what we wanted... or even what we needed.

Lunch with a friend last week reinforced some of my own behavior. She's pursuing her Master's Degree, and because of that she's slowly pulling herself out of other activities - something that I've done more than once over the years to the seeming dismay of varied social networks. One day I'm really interested in something and immerse myself in it. Weeks later, it no longer interests me and I seem to disappear from that region, perhaps still existing on the fringes - sort of like what I have done with Second Life recently. Why? Much the same reason.

Time is finite. Time management is imperative for one's sanity. And thus, triage of interests happens at times. A long trail of interests and people I know because of them follows my lifetime, but no one branch defines my life. Instead, my life defines the branches - and long ago I learned that Life is something that takes you along it's own path despite your interests elsewhere.

I remember a time when I was not connected to a collective consciousness known as the Internet. Even when I got connected, reading Levy's Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books) had me stretching for more. For over a decade, I have drank of the collective consciousness and have added to it a bit, here and there.

So why was it an advertisement for a writing tablet, the Neo, caught my fancy? Was it that it's an electronic device that is portable and would allow me to write anywhere? No, that wasn't it. I'll quote what caught my eye:

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.