I missed the day by an hour or two, but it seems worth noting that in spite of long periods of drought, this blog has somehow managed to reach its tenth birthday. The changes in both the format of the site and the life of its author since September 1, 2000, are too many to count, especially this late at night. Suffice it to say that when I first fired up Blogger that fall, my life in many ways had fallen apart. Much of the last decade has been spent coming to an understanding that life is always falling apart in some ways and coming together in others. Sometimes this cycle has been a leisurely, undulating road of change; more often it has felt like whiplash between extremes. However, I sit here a decade later in the midst of my current crop of uncertainties, problems, and blessings, and what I feel most is gratitude. Family, friends, opportunities, and challenges abound; on this anniversary, I thank the universe for them all and what they have made of me.

I’ll have more to say about this topic, I’m sure. There are many ways to approach the future, from despair to cynicism to optimism to outright obliviousness, and I admire those who are willing to look it in the eye and really imagine what lies ahead with as much realism as the human mind can muster. One of those who I believe does is Vinay Gupta, and his current collaborative book project, The Future We Deserve, is in the final days of a Kickstarter funding run. I’m a backer, and to encourage additional support for the book, I’m blogging the piece below, written by Woody Evans, as part of the project’s Blogathon. My comments follow.

Credibility & Calories: A Perspective on Information

(Final draft pending any revelations) (The FWD)
by Woody Evans

Information doesn’t want anything, but people do. People want things like sex and freedom and control and food and community and property.

Information isn’t a kind of perfect thing, it’s not an ideal, it’s not even a value. It’s a tool. And being a tool doesn’t make information good.

Tools are generally considered good if they’re useful. Hammers are used to build houses. And we all know that good tools can be used for bad things.

Information is not essentially good, though it is an essential good. That is to say, it’s a commodity that has value, can be traded, and that can also lose value and degrade over time.

Thought experiment: think of the most valuable discrete item of information you know. How do you assign its particular value relative to other things you know? Is it the most valuable to you personally, to your community, or to the world system as a whole? Maybe you have to use a utilitarian frame to give it value (it’s valuable because it can serve the most number of people the best); maybe you have a particular religious frame (it’s valuable because when someone knows it, that person is enlightened or saved); maybe it’s valuable to you because it can make you a lot of money (or make a poor country rich).

Would it be valuable to the watermelon farmers and field hands near Mize, Mississippi? The land there is woods and small farms, piney, built on loam and clay, and full of fierce folks who spend a lot of time in church. They drink, fuss and fight, try to get degrees at the community college.

If the most valuable information in the world is a simple solar hack (filling plastic bottles with whatever water you’ve got, leaving them in the sun for a full day to make them safe to drink, say), how valuable is it to my rural Mississippi cousins? They have plentiful well water, the Okatoma river easily at hand, and over 50 inches of rainfall per year.

If the most valuable information in the world is a prayer, you’d get them more interested—but it better be a Baptist prayer. You see what I mean. Information is not objectively valuable.

To talk about the information needs of the developing world, we need to talk about what information is and what it is not.

Information is not:

• Salvific.
• More valuable than gauze, iodine, or syringes.
• The key to a floating world of equality or purity or dignity.

So what is information, at its best, for the world’s poor?

Here’s the answer: information is food and health. Anything beyond that, until the basics get ironed out, is lagniappe. We get the information to the people so that they can sustainably clothe, feed, and heal themselves. Your IT initiatives for the burgeoning sub-Saharan mobile “market”? Let it focus on these basics. Dignity, open government, capital ventures—these things may follow only if there’s a well-laid cornerstone to build from.

People need to eat, and when your kid lacks something basic you’ll do a hell of a lot that you never thought you would to get her what she needs. Nothing is more valuable than the bit of information that leads me to food to fill her belly with.

Calories build the credibility of the information technologist.

We build beyond the basics when the luxury presents itself.

Information is only as valuable as the context and the people who use it. Evans’ essay caught my eye among the submissions because of some other reading I’ve been doing about aid work in both developing countries and disaster zones at Tales from the Hood. The aid worker who writes it has strong opinions about the right and wrong way to really help people in desperate situations, and takes particular offense at aid (though well-meaning) that starts from an end of its own and works backward to justify itself. What is missing in such a case is the question, “What do you need?” to those one is trying to help. His imaginative vision of AidMart offers one potential ideal for the future.

I’m not a strict believer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it makes intuitive sense to me that the kind of self-actualization required for “dignity, open government, capital ventures,” the cornerstones of functional society, can’t be established or maintained well without the physical and basic emotional needs of people being met. And though Evans and the unnamed author of Tales from the Hood are both talking more specifically about the developing world, it’s just as sound a principle here in the “First World” as our own sense of security continues to erode. The realities of Katrina, financial collapse, the Gulf spill and nearly 10% unemployment mean that the choices of which level gets satisfied first are plenty real to millions of people in one of the richest countries on Earth.

So the questions I ask myself, are “What now? What information do I have that could be useful, and how can I get it to those who can use it?” I hope this post is worthy as a first answer to that question. If you’re interested in contributing or getting more information about the book, just click the handy widget.

And read Vinay’s summary of the project and what we’re trying to accomplish. How can your voice be part of the conversation?

True confession…I have a thing for tiny houses. I say confession because this desire is in direct conflict with the amount of stuff I’ve accumulated over time, but the appeal of the tiny house is strong. I love the idea of living in a house I built, one that can accompany me in changing circumstance and which is sized perfectly for my life. Watching Dee Williams and Jay Shafer talk about their houses with such pride and ownership makes me want to downsize in such a way that my life would fit into a smaller house. Off to purge some things…

I want to be able to tell a story like this one. It’s simple and short, but it has such depth of spirit. In our culture it’s rare to think of death as beautiful; loss is framed for us as something inevitably tragic and to be avoided. And it’s true that the pain of loss is inevitable, but it’s not the only truth present. The fact of mortality makes love and life all the more precious, and something to be deeply savored. This video is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen all year, precisely because it walks the line between the love and pain that are present when a loved one dies. I cried all the way through, for his losses and for mine.

Happy birthday Mom, I still miss you (and I know you would have cried too).

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

“Politics is the art of the practical. Poetry is about enlarging the context.”

Next, read this from La Vida Locavore.

A really good summation from Parker Palmer of how and why our political system is the way it is, from a soul-based perspective:

I’m currently reading Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness right now, which could be described as a manual for dealing with this type of soul emptiness. Very interesting so far, especially for the essential Quaker-ness of his approach, which lures the soul out of hiding by creating a safe place for it to emerge both within the individual and within a trusted community. Thought-provoking stuff in a world where so many people are already undergoing wrenching transitions due to political upheavals, environmental issues, health problems, loss or change of jobs, etc.

Glenn Beck is a ChatBot? Great tongue-in-cheek piece about how the level of discourse and dog-whistling in right-wing media has descended to a level where it might be duplicable by a computer.

So adorable…it’s impossible to get anything productive done at home these days thanks to our new arrivals:

We’re in the process of building a coop (they will be inside for a few months until they’re big enough), and in the meantime it’s Chicken TV all the time. Weekly updates at the YouTube channel as time warrants.

I often get asked, when people find out I’m in grad school, what I plan to do with my degree. The truth is, I don’t exactly know; the degree itself is the artifact of a discovery process that I hope will point me in a new direction that’s still somewhat hazy. However, certain things are becoming clearer, and I think that a large part of my future life will probably look something like this:

The chickens we just got are a new phase of this, following the gardening/canning that’s already happening. I’m also almost finished with a Permaculture Design course and am looking to combine that with the more philosophical/psychological stuff I’m learning in school. I guess if I could aspire to such heights, I’d like to follow in the footsteps of someone like Wendell Berry, who has such a strong connection to the land and an equally beautiful way of talking about that connection.

Funny or Die does it again, this time courtesy of Jane Lynch and friends. Brings a whole new level to “It’s raining men” for me.