No Straight Lines, argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of our industrialised world. Now faced with an unsustainable trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, we have entered an era in which the rules we have previously organised our lives around no longer apply. Leaving us with both a design problem and a design challenge which we must urgently solve. By describing an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen, No Straight Lines presents a revolutionary logic and an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world.

Craftsmanship can and does manifest it self in many ways – we need to celebrate them all. This lecture from The Do Lectures given by the charming Nick Hand.

In an age of fast, there’s slow. In an age of quantity there’s quality. On a bike ride around Britain Nick discovered his appreciation of the craftsman and women of Britain. And how we need to keep these skills alive.

A video of my take on design. No Straight Lines more info.

That quote has always resonated with me. As it leads to the question, what makes work worthwhile? And how do we define work? This thought cropped this morning reading an article that Per Håkansson had flipped over to me. It was Douglas Rushkoff musing on the mantra of jobs, jobs, jobs Are Jobs Obsolete? – yes he agrees we all want to be doing useful things – but the jobs our current politicians describe he feels are built on a dying age, an industrial age. Perhaps he suggests we could envision a far better way of filling our time…

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

Its a great big idea and some I guess are already doing that. The big issue is also that jobs have come to define us as people. “What do you do?” is the line of interrogation that goes when first meeting someone perhaps for the first time. Brain surgeon or bank robber? Work and identity become hugely important.

In a post entitled Modern Life is Rubbish I refer to the work of Richard Sennett,

In, The Corrosion of Character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. Richard Sennett describes how the sense of hopelessness, and isolation, deconstructs our character in the workplace, with ultimate tragic consequences. For Sennett, “character” is defined as the capacity to construct and keep commitments – not just in marriage, but also in friendships, communities, and workplaces – and the ability to provide continuous, coherent narratives of personal experience. In Sennett’s view, the “unfettered capitalism” that describes our recent history in labour markets, work schedules, institutions, and technology – renders “character” impossible. Contemporary capitalism demolishes the social and cultural foundations of “character,” and upholds instead the punishing ideal of incessant change.

Rushkoff concludes, “for the time being, as we contend with what appears to be a global economic slowdown by destroying food and demolishing homes, we might want to stop thinking about jobs as the main aspect of our lives that we want to save. They may be a means, but they are not the ends”.

The nature of work and identity appear in the forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of our non-linear world

Click here for a deeper dive into Craftsmanship

More info on (No Straight Lines)

Video: Designing for transformation

Because what Ross has done in that time is travel the length and breadth of the United States, photographing and documenting the life of juveniles in “Juuvie”. Juvenile prison. This work builds upon his last project called The Architecture of Authority.

I think its an important piece of work, its a very political piece of work, and it is a very powerful piece of work. Ross annotates one of his photographs, a picture of a boy with a massive head scar that covers the entire side of his head, The scar is from a traumatic brain injury. Many of the youth in the system have been the victims of violence, on the streets and at home, resulting in TBI and PTSD. Scars like this, while not common, are not infrequent.

What's the worse thing you can do to a human being? Solitary

Harpers Magazine have run a story on Ross’s epic journey which you can read (here) and (here).

Ross himself writes on his website,

Juvenile In Justice documents the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities that treat, confine, punish, assist and, occasionally, harm them. My medium is a conscience.

For the past five years, I have interviewed and photographed both pre-adjudicated and committed youth in the juvenile justice system. To date, I have interviewed and photographed over 1,000 juveniles and administrators at 300+ facilities in 30 states in the U.S. I have made sure to keep the children’s identities unknown, by either photographing them from behind or obscuring their faces.

I have photographed group homes, police departments, youth correctional facilities, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, shelters, Montessori classrooms, CPS interview rooms, and maximum security lock-down and non-lock-down shelters, to name a few. Earl Dunlap, the Director of Cooke County Detention Center, welcomed me to his facility with the words: “Welcome to the gates of hell.”

In the past I have photographed for major magazines, newspapers and institutions. At this phase in my career I am turning my lens towards the juvenile justice system and using what I have learned in 40+ years of photography to create a database of compelling images to instigate policy reform. My products are unbiased photographic and textual evidence of a system that houses more than 100,000 kids every day.

In the US all prisons are privatised – when you run a ‘for profit’ organisation, you need to input raw material to extract value – cash. In this instance the raw materials are juveniles from whose incarceration cash is extracted via the tax payer. So here’s a simple game plan one invests in prisons, and then lobbies to ensure the law accommodates easier sentencing and longer jail terms – because the more raw material one inputs the more value is extracted. Some Senators are in jail today for doing precisely that.

Ross tells me another story of a young boy, who has mental health problems, and is under 14. He shot his father with a gun. Why? Because his father had systematically raped his son since he could remember, then he started on the boys younger sister – so to protect her he shot his father dead. The boy is in Juuvie. As Ross would say, ‘Go figure’.

In a New York Times article from 2010

Gladys Carrión, New York’s reform-minded commissioner of the Office of Children and Family Services, has been calling on the state to close many of its remote, prison-style juvenile facilities and shift resources and children to therapeutic programs located in their communities. Her efforts have met fierce and predictably self-interested resistance from the unions representing workers in juvenile prisons and their allies in Albany. A recent series of damning reports have underscored the flaws in New York’s juvenile justice system and the urgent need to shut down these facilities.

Not surprisingly, these institutions do a terrible job of rehabilitation. According to a study of children released from custody between 1991 and 1995, 89 percent of the boys and 81 percent of the girls were eventually rearrested. New York’s facilities are so disastrous and inhumane that state officials recently asked the courts to refrain from sending children to them, except in cases in which they presented a clear danger to the public.

We don’t think about the system of prison, or at least very few of us do.  But in talking to Ross, and watching him work you can see the unfairness, greed, and a great inhumanity oozing out of every pore of this system. And this work profoundly resonates with me, and with the work I have been doing with No Straight Lines. This for me is an indicator of the fact that we live at the edge of the adaptive range of our industrial society, where we are deconstructing humanity almost to the point of deconstruction.

We must ask ourselves the question, what role does any organisation play in our society? Is it there to serve humanity and society, or is it there to create power? To generate huge revenues for a few at the cost of the many? And we then have to go on and ask and why do we stand for it? Will our conscience stand for it? Is this really the American Dream or is it time to reinvent it?

Juvenile In Justice will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Fall of 2012 and Feldman Gallery in 2013.

In one part of Ethiopia, communities are putting the world’s governments and many aid agencies to shame.

You can read the full blog post here

In fact the question is: Is online piracy and ubiquitous free content killing our culture? I believe we must always be open to divergent and different perspectives of the world. We must be prepared to see the world from anothers’ perspective. I do think this is at times a good question to ask.

Morozov writes: Levine’s call to arms – “it’s time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age”

But then one has to ask the question for example is Fox News culture? meaningful culture, worthwhile culture. Rupert Mordoch famously said he would make Sky News in the UK more like Fox if he had his way. Just have a read about the delightful Roger Ailes that runs Fox. The mainstream media that presents information as truth that plays a key and important role in shaping the debate about our world, has been found wanting. Is this system worth preserving?

But I persisted with the review – some good points raised. However,

In a chapter subtitled “How the internet could kill Mad Men”, Levine frets about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s, American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed Levine’s conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would be “How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men”.

And how many times have incumbents fought bitterly and viciously to stop others. The telegraph versus the telephone for example. Morozov goes on…

Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine lists among the greatest threats to cable television – seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly 6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books – in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less appealing.

None of this excites Levine, who complains that the internet has not encouraged innovation. “Like TV, the internet is only as good as what’s on,” he writes. Statements like this underscore the danger of setting internet policy based on the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

I arrived at the conclusion that Levine is representative of a certain form of market fundamentalism – and this fundamentalism is dangerous. Born out of not understanding, not wanting to understand. An arrogance about what is “culture” and who has the right to create it. He sees markets not as cultural but purely economic, he sees people only as consumers. Culture in his view, and people that he represents, see “culture” as a means to extract money from people. Simple. As the economist John Kay wrote,

“Capitalists are capitalism’s worst enemy, and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”

For me, and Morozov saves it for last, is that in “Levines opinion James Murdoch was a saviour of Journalism.” The same James Murdoch who may have perjured himself, who along with his father owned a newspaper that in its quest for monetary gain, hacked into the voice mails of dead children, to get “the edge” on their rivals in the tabloid newspaper wars. If that is what Levine thinks is culture, then God help us all.

Wikipedia writes

In this episode Curtis tracks the effects of Ayn Rand‘s ideas on American financial markets, particularly via the influence on Alan Greenspan. Ayn Rand was born in Russia and moved to America in 1928 and worked for Cecil B. DeMille, where she got some of the plot for what became The Fountainhead from this period. Later she moved to New York, and set up a reading group called The Collective where they considered her work. On advice from a friend, Greenspan (then a logical positivist) joined The Collective.

When published, although critically savaged, Rand’s Objectivist ideas were popular and came to heavily infiltrate California, particularly Silicon Valley. The computer utopian belief (Californian Ideology) that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become ‘Randian heroes’, only working for their own happiness, became more widespread.

The programme concludes that, indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape.

The presentation dealt with this idea: That mobile communications does not have to be a tactical endeavor, it can be a deep strategic one enabling companies to run leaner, to reach audiences in new and novel ways, to redefine a company organizationally, and create new markets with new revenues. In ‘creating assets and access in the intention economy’ I challenged our thinking in how mobile communications plays the key role in this rapidly evolving story.