Social Acupuncture

The Concomitant Penetration of Every Moment By the Potential to Create

Posted by Richard on Monday, 7 March 2011

The somewhat recent release of the Situationist iPhone app, which encourages nearby strangers to playfully interact, sparked a revisiting of Social Acupuncture by Darren O'Donnell. And there it is, on page 79, my first introduction to the Situationism movement. Here's the paragraph in question from Social Acupuncture: “Art's drift out of the field of representation and its move into relational forms, as well as the ever-increasing economic expediency of culture in the so-called creative economies described by [Richard] Florida and others, have created a proliferation of avenues through which to distribute artistry. The Situationists may have had some fantasies about the liberating potential of art as an everyday lived experience, where all moments of one's life become a creative opportunity; now we have the concomitant penetration of every moment by the potential to create, and in turn, to work. Hardt and Negri point out that capitalism is always innovating in response to resistance against it. The freeing of labour from the Fordist regime of the factory floor was imagined, at first, to be a positive movement, but capitalism easily incorporated these innovations. The idea of working from home was once an appealing notion, but now it brings with it the opportunity to never escape work, to field emails at all hours, to be lured to the humming for just another minute or two of labour.”

Stacy

Posted by Richard on Sunday, 9 September 2007

I've finally checked out Darren Barefoot's Gnomedex talk about geeks doing good, where he invents a currency called the Stacy, named after a woman he helps feed sometimes in Vancouver, designed to track how much good you do. The talk has helped inspire some good deeds already, including delivering pizzas to Pigeon Park in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (instead of participating in the BarCamp Vancouver thread where the idea first appeared, I decided to donate to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank). Since reading Social Acupuncture, I've dropped my objection to talking about the good deeds people have done as self-serving, since done right bragging about doing good can influence people others to do so as well. I'm not going to keep track of whatever good it is I do: I lie enough to people asking me for change that I'm sure it balances out in the end.

This Is the Year I Read Books and Review Them

Posted by Richard on Thursday, 1 March 2007

Up until about 2003 or 2004, I read up to 20 books a year, mostly on my way to work on the bus or in my copious free time not working, since my job was less than half-time. Since working full-time and on salary—meaning no set start or quitting time—priority given to dead tree editions of pretty much any written text went to reading digital ink in the form of weblogs and the delicious articles they link to.

Already this year I've read three books: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford by John Robert Greene, [Amazon], Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen, and most recently, Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance, and Utopia by Darren O'Donnell. I am currently working my way through Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, and have purchased Dreaming In Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg, which sits patiently on my coffee table.

All the books have reasons why I either read them or bought them: the book about Gerald Ford because he had recently died; the Buddhism book partly on the recommendation of Web Worker Daily but also partly because my girlfriend is a practicing Buddhist (I was reading the book as a Valentine's Day gift to her, but I was afraid she was on to me when she published that); Social Acupuncture on Karen's recommendation; and Wikinomics because Will Pate attended the Wikinomics book launch in Toronto and made note that some consider Tapscott to not be a citizen of the community he writes about. Will calls him a translator and diplomat, but popularizer might be a better term. at about the same time as the Internet, and therefore. He has it right, and those that don't yet understand it or know how to benefit from it, particuarly in the business sense, are the target audience, not people like me who live it. (I bought Dreaming in Code because I have a weak tie to one of the book's protagonists, Ted Leung.)

I intend to write and publish reviews of all books mentioned, but as you can tell I'm already two books behind with a third book soon added to the queue. But this is the year I read book and review them. For now, though, that's a window into what I'm reading and thinking about these days.