Jerry’s Brain And The Heresies It Contains

At last night’s Hillside Club “Fireside Meeting,” Jerry Michalski presented his thoughts on the question that’s been nagging at him…what is it that caused some of the great thinkers of the past 300 years to become “outcasts?” Why have certain types of outside-the-mainstream thought been marginalized and their proponents ostracized?

Part technology demo, part presentation, part sorta-participative-performance piece, Jerry started out with an overview of what *he’s* been using for the last decade to capture, collect, and organize his thoughts, a piece of visual software called TheBrain. In some ways, The Brain is sort of like del.icio.us on steroids, in that it enables someone in the period of just a few seconds to tag a website, book, piece of music, document or any other “thought” with user-defined tags, index it, and store it for easy future access.

(from here)

Where TheBrain goes beyond tagging-and-bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, however, is in its ability to create some basic relationships between the different bookmarks (parent, child, peer/sibling, etc.). Although the fundamentals are straightforward, the power of this approach becomes evident when Jerry shows that over the past 10 years he’s logged over 60,000 bookmarks into the system (62,864 as of last night, and counting…), each one connected to a handful of others, creating an ecosystem of links that touches on many of the key areas of human thought.

(Side note: Tracking bookmarks in a dynamic medium such as the web is a Sisyphean task, as web sites change and companies are born…and die. However, the Internet Archive and Wayback Machine really are the “4th dimension” of the web, and allow one to chronicle the life and death of startups with quite a bit of clarity.)

After showing one mechanism for organizing thoughts, Jerry moved over to discussing some of the “heresies” of a number of outcast thinkers of the past few hundred years, including:

• John Taylor Gatto (heresy: “Compulsory education isn’t necessary.”)
• Alice Miller (heresy: “Abuse is epidemic.”)
• Russ Ackoff (heresy: “There is no such thing as a problem.”)
• Richard Stallman (heresy: “Shared software.”)
• Christopher Alexander (heresy: “People can design.”)
• George Fox (heresy: “God is in everyone.”)
• David Bohm (heresy: “We’re all connected.”)

Disparate thoughts. Disparate ideas, spanning hundreds of years. Yet, Jerry theorizes that there is a common message that each of these thinkers was railing against. That message they opposed?

“We don’t trust you.”

We. Don’t. Trust. You.
…to self-educate.
…to enjoy authentic art.
…to minister to one another.
…to tell the truth about your lives.
…to design the places we inhabit.
etc.

(Kenneth Tyler asked the question-of-the-evening here, in wondering “Who is ‘we?’ in the statement above…is “we” the government, some other authority group, distrustful organizations, ourselves…?)

The remainer of the evening was wide-open and interactive, with the 40-or-so folks in the room batting around the ideas presented, and finally splitting into emergent groups discussing their various takes on the implications of the discussion.

Moving from the esoteric to the practical, however, the points made at Hillside ring strongly. There are myriad examples where “We Don’t Trust You” is the rule in business with how customers are often treated:

• DRM: We don’t trust our customers with music and movies
• Product Warning Labels: We don’t trust our customers not to harm themselves
• Fitting rooms: Take a card to prove the number of garments you are taking inside
• Onerous contracts: We don’t trust you to do what you said you’d do
• Misinformation or lack of information, and feeding uncertainty: We don’t trust customers to make good decisions based on good information.

…and so forth.

Jerry was recording the evening on his iPod, so when it goes up as a podcast (at Sociate, I’d presume), definitely check it out.

Note to self: Today, make an effort to notice the places where rules, structures, and physical barriers have been put in place based on lack of trust and/or to ostensibly protect me from myself.