ItC iconised

1. SCENARIOS

Look out the window and you'll see more than one possible future.

With many important instances, we don't know about probabilities, so we talk about scenarios, and we can even arrange those scenarios as a colourful fan, like the colours out of a prism, sorted from "best imaginable future" to "worst imaginable future".

Some of the "best imaginable" are barely imaginable and no, I don't think "our simultaneous falling off a horse with ecological enlightenment" is likely at all. It's a scenario to play around with, if we have time. And approaching 7,000,000,000 people, we do have some time between us, so go for it if you're so inclined.

Some of the "worst imaginable" are indeed hopeless, and if and when it's certain that an asteroid the size of the Earth is going for our center of gravity, then I'll join the tearful carnival. Or maybe:

• Denial will kick in and we'll keep planting seeds.
• Or we'll start throwing information into space, for someone else.
• Or we'll take care of each other to bring the grand total of momentary happiness to its max.

2. ACTION

Thing is, we see no such asteroid, and we have no precedent of simultaneous enlightenment, but the fan is still there, and the colorful ribs still point to our here and now, so what do we do?

Experience suggests some present actions are cheap and just make sense. So we drop an umbrella in the car, just in case it rains.

But the best course of action is doing stuff that's good for several scenarios:

• Kids learn to swim to have fun, and they can also recover a lost ball.
• You buy a phone to stay in touch with friends, and it helps you call for help with a flat tyre.
• You use hexayurts for Burning Man and, voila, it can be used for disasters and poverty too.

Which brings us to seeds and documentation.

I feel one of the best actions today is the creation, preparation and disemination of good seeds that can stay in the shade until it rains, know-how that can explode in a rush, informational air-bags that can go viral.

Both a knot and a hexayurt can be made with available resources, but you need to know how to make them.

Which is why I think you should take a look at learning, making and documenting good stuff:

• http://harkopen.com/hackerspaces
• http://www.appropedia.org/
• http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt
• http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page

Personally, I helped with www.appropedia.org/Camp_Danger_Hexayurt_Hinge_Technique and I'm currently having a go at http://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_H13_Plywood.

3. ICON

So, as promised in the title, here's "Imagine the Canaries", iconised - feel free to improve, as it's public domain:

Contagion across the barricade

I first came across this concept in a book called "The chalice and the blade".

Apparently, cities in Greece were peaceful, but when one attacked the other then the other responded, first peacefully, then with force.

So there's many among us, and many inside each of us, and we all have a sleeping warrior within, waiting to raise his warrior head if the environment awakens him.

Yet, there's also an observer within us. One that, just guessing because I'm not a practitioner in meditation, comes up strongest, and calmest, and most powerful, when we meditate.

If that observer calls warrior-ness a disease, then that disease can be communicated without physical contact, without germs or vectors, across the barricade.

And a disease it is, because warrior-ness kills more than it heals. It makes room for new stuff, but so does creation of new stuff to make old stuff obsolete.

Creation of new stuff doesn't have the secondary effects, the sequels, the damage of war and killing.

I'm finally reminded of the conversation between two men in what's now called America - in the land where maybe someone will say, in the future, "America was here".

The conversation was about a dream the younger man had had. In the dream there were a dark wolf and a shiny wolf. "Who will win" was the question. The answer was: "the one you feed".

Let's feed our better wolf, and let's win by obsoleting war.

This inner fight is harder than war, for those who need the adrenaline.

Just saying.

My current fear

Ok, so here's my current fear.

Worth nil, of course, but here it is.

I fear the economic mess Europe is in will bring a melt-down in a few months.

I fear I haven't done enough.

I have a smaller fear, of course, which is that my bigger fear will be "wrong (in timing)" = "you did all that work and nothing happened (yet)".

This smaller fear keeps me (relatively) paralysed, and knowing this makes my bigger fear stronger.

"Take action", you say. "Any small action."

Yeah, thanks. :-) It's just that I revisit the roundabout every now and then, and a second later I'm on the road again.

Same with you, or what?

Ideas that blew my mind today

• http://blog.thesuperfluid.com/2011/07/attention-economy-flirting-escalation/#comment-245624497 "measure room for improvement", so you know where to move towards.
• http://miiu.org/wiki/Crowdmoves Move together to create a better place.
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-oY-Clm_F0 Open Source Apprenticeship to superseed formal education.
  
• Yeah, ok, let's translate 20 pieces of TheFWD into Spanish and let's see if there would be some other 80 pieces in Spanish.

That's 3, sorry, 4 ideas in one day.

Too many mind-blowing ideas per time-unit.

That's future shock.

And it's only going to get worse.

So FuckIt.

How do you start?

How do I start meditating?

How do you start exercising?

We start by stopping.

We stop doing other things.

Look at what you do, and stop it.