Brooks/Cheney

David Brooks writes about Obama and Clinton's Jefferson-Jackson speeches last November in his column this morning:

Obama sketched out a different theory of social change than the one Clinton had implied earlier in the evening. Instead of relying on a president who fights for those who feel invisible, Obama, in the climactic passage of his speech, described how change bubbles from the bottom-up: “And because that somebody stood up, a few more stood up. And then a few thousand stood up. And then a few million stood up. And standing up, with courage and clear purpose, they somehow managed to change the world!”

For people raised on Jane Jacobs, who emphasized how a spontaneous dynamic order could emerge from thousands of individual decisions, this is a persuasive way of seeing the world. For young people who have grown up on Facebook, YouTube, open-source software and an array of decentralized networks, this is a compelling theory of how change happens.

Nice. I don't know if Brooks has read Emergence or not, but one of things I take a little pride in is the connection between Jacobs and the world of decentralized software, Open Source, etc. People had obviously been thinking about those themes before I wrote Emergence but the whole concept of applying Jacobs' urban theories to the way we think about the web was something that hadn't been done before, as far as I know -- and now it's a much more familiar connection to people, so much so that Brooks can made an offhand reference to it without even walking though the logic. That's pretty cool to see.

While I'm patting myself on the back, I have some direct evidence (the details of which I can't reveal for national security reasons) that Dick Cheney read The Ghost Map over Christmas, and apparently enjoyed it. (I'm kidding about the national security, but not about the fact that he read it.) Obviously, I'm not the biggest fan of Cheney, but still, there's something very cool about the idea. It's one of the things that's so rewarding about writing books; I effectively got five or six uninterrupted hours to talk directly to the Vice President about my theories about cities, disease, progress -- even the anti-science bent of the current administration. I didn't get actual face time, but my ideas did.

Of course, all of this had made me think about how to get the next book into the hands of Obama... By the way, I have a new next book that I'm starting to write this month. More about that later.

Comments

[Rikard Linde]

"By the way, I have a new next book that I'm starting to write this month."

Wohooo. Looking forward to that. Is it "The Long Zoom" book or is it something else. I'd LOVE to read more about Long Zoom- related topics. Long Live Long Zoom.

I've thought about the generational divide that exists between people who deal with information, and therefore understand the shifting balance between physical and non-physical stuff, and people who don't (typically older people).
It seems to me that Obama's message resonates poorly with people from the second group.
This surely isn't a revelation to anyone but I think it explains some of the behavior of voters. In my private dream it also explains why Obama will win Texas tonight:-)

Rikard

[Sven Cahling]

Funny, I was thinking about that earlier today: what will his next book be about (I´m reading Ghost Map at the moment)? And I wondered if I could figure it out. In fact, here´s an idea: ask us if we can correctly guess the subject of the next one. The winner gets a copy. You get (maybe) even more ideas.

[Dr. Kev]

hello everyone! Just finished Everything Bad is Good for you and LOVED IT...brilliant..

the premise on the implicit opposable thumb and evolutionary progress of media hit home for me as a renegade shrink struggling with uncovering the secrets of human behavior change. As a neuropsychologist turned coach, i share many of the insights of Steven in the power of the meta-level of thinking that really is at play underneath things we write off as mindless like games and tv. It hit me reading his book that therapy--where us shrinks try to deal with the aftereffects of alignment/misalignment with pop culture---has not kept up with the "multithreaded lines" of the Seinfelds, Sopranos, etc of the world. We still carry the Starsky and Hutch linguistic tools..and are gravely ill prepared to transform human beings, their brains, their hearts. That is, much of my work dives in to the realm where change really happens ---the meta level of thinking....

My latest ideas developed after reading your book, Mr. Johnson, prompted me to scribble out some ideas for a possible partnering book for us---"The Lying Couch: What Shrinks Dont Say and Why That Matters to Happiness"...

what do ya say? email me....kevin@effectiveexecutivecoaching.com
Dr. Kev
www.DrKevinFleming.com

[Jared]

Now all you need to do is create a "trashy" TV show that makes high cognitive demands on its viewers, and get the VP to watch THAT. Because we now know that's more intellectually engaging and therefore a better learning tool. ;)

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