Ships Passing in the Night

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Opportunity Collaboration, poptech

Published October 23, 2009 @ 08:37AM PT

An observation.

I've been at two conferences in the last two weeks. More or less equally remote (Maine and Mexico), relatively similarly sized, both relatively expensive to get to (but with a lot of support and flexibility there), and both equally committed to breaking silos. Most importantly, they're both equally committed to changing the world.

Yet after a quick straw poll, I'm the only person who is attending both.

The Opportunity Collaboration had an immense amount of ground level expertise, experience with the philanthropic world, and a community organizing background. Pop!Tech has a huge number of designers, brand strategies, innovation consultants, technologists and corporate actors. It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a Pop!Tech speaker) to see how powerful the collaborations between these two groups could be.

So why aren't they? There are a lot of logistical reasons of course, but there is also something deeper. For all our talk of collaboration and breaking out of silos, we still live in a professional setting that stuffs us into boxes and denies us the ability to really go out and seek connection and strength in new places.

I think it's further proof that we have to institutionalize a culture of professional experimentation and exploration.

(Photo: joiseyshowaa)

The Return of the "Noble Savage" and the Danger of Romanticized Debate

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Dissent, poptech

Published October 23, 2009 @ 07:18AM PT

At both the Opportunity Collaboration last week and in the first day of Pop!Tech yesterday, there has been an occasional tendency towards the dramatic romanticizing of the human condition in and around poverty. While there is much to learn about resilience and the joy in community from the poor, the conversation can easily detour into a modern day rehashing of the 19th century notion of the "noble savage." It's my contention that we simply don't have time for conversation on this level any more.

The original notion of the "noble savage" was a counterpoint in the Age of Reason. In a sort of reframing of "original sin," the idea was that man's original state - connected with nature, in small, simple collectives, was pure, and that it was science, technology, and living in urban societies that was corrupting.

It is, perhaps, a seductive reasoning, particularly for crowds today who are grappling with the excesses of human consumption. What's more, it plays into an increasingly vibrant topic of conversation to wonder whether our material good has actually made us happier, and whether it is happiness, not GDP that we should be measuring as an indicator of a nation's success.

I've seen it happen over and over again in the last week that people take these very good and very important questions - the excess of consumption and a reinterpretation of happiness - and unfortunately take them to their dramatic extremes.

At the Opportunity Collaboration, it manifested as a fetishism for geographically-organized community. There was an idea that came out often in the group discussions that individualism corroded the power of community. That may be, and obviously individualism taken to its extreme leaves little room for a commitment to common destiny. But how can we on the one hand rail against the accident of birth that predisposes people to poverty, health, and other injustice, yet at the same time hold up the accident of birth that roots people in a particular geographic community as the essential organizing principle of human existence?

Forgive my individualism, but had I been rooted only in the community in which I happen to have been born, I would be rotting away, buried under a lack of opportunity and unstimulating job opportunities. Community matters deeply, but geography is only one organizing principle. The power and beauty of the new world we live in is that we can carry community with us, find and connect with people we would never have met 20 years ago, and connect people across silos and sectors.

At Pop!Tech yesterday, the extremes were manifested in an argument about the inherent joy and happiness of poor people. One participant in the audience asked how we address climate change if India and China have a right to the sort of increase in quality of life that we in the West harnessed through cheap, destructive modes of production. Photographer Chris Jordan, who I blogged about yesterday and have deep respect for, responded to thundering applause that poor people's quality of life was higher than ours. He then went on to list a set of indigenous people who he had lived with who were beningly joyous, apparently all the time.

This quality of conversation has absolutely no place in our world. Seriously. In the same way that the Millennial generation has largely turned its back on the political Culture Wars, we need to turn our back on any conversation that tries to pit development versus underdevelopment, urban versus rural, modernity versus primativism, or basically other Manichean construction that somehow promises to enlighten.

No one group has it all right. The questions that matter exist on a plane simultaneously above and below the level of the diametric oppositions above. The core questions of human existence are and have remained the same for some time: what is our responsibility to others? How do we derive and understand meaning? How do we live our values? In day to day life, the name of the game is doing the best we can and constantly trying to improve, a little bit at a time, how we treat others, how we use resources, how we discover meaning in small beauty.

In his wonderful 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, author David Wallace wrote that the choice of what to think about was the real freedom of education. He said: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

Human history shows us how easy it is to wrap ourselves in totalitarian ideologies of any political, social, or economic stripe. It also shows us a road of discarded ideologies that were too inflexible for the complicated, random, vague, malleable, and ever changing reality of human society and human existence.

We live in a world which is heaving under the pressure of resource constraints, in which injustice is still rampant, in which talent and capacity is wasted over and over and over every day for no good reason. We just don't have time for conversations that drag us into a dialectic between romantic ideologies and don't advance us towards real learning, real understanding, and a greater capacity for a more healthy 21st century.

(Photo: An icon of Manichaenism, an early form of metaphysics which views the world as a dualistic opposition between the forces of good and evil. Source)

Cancerous Consumption

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: poptech

Published October 22, 2009 @ 03:18PM PT

An interesting thing has happened at Pop!Tech today. While the theme was meant to have been "America: Reimagined," there has been an irresistible momentum across a huge number of presenters towards imagining America as a metaphor for humanity's insatiable consumption and the way that it has fundamentally imperiled our earth.

Photographer Chris Jordan has dedicated his life to documenting consumption, and making the invisible byproducts of our convenience visible. Today, for the first time in public, he shared an immensely disturbing slideshow of photographs taken on Midway Island, a small Island in the middle of the Pacific more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continental coast.

Chris had heard rumors that there, in that most remote of wildernesses, there were baby albatross dead with plastic sticking out of their carcasses. Having to see for himself, he went in September 2009. What he found was even worse than he had imagined.

Jordan compared the trip to getting a diagnosis of lymphatic cancer from a doctor. If this cancer is there, on Midway, as far removed from normal human activity as can be, then it's everywhere. Jordan concluded by saying that while he didn't have much more to say, it was something it seemed we all should be talking about.

It's getting harder and harder to avoid the implication that our system of existence has set the clock ticking on our future. That's a bleak, bleak place to be for people like me who are of a generation just coming into the adult world.

Yet necessity is the mother of invention. Young people today are the most educated, networked generation in history. As it becomes increasingly clear that we have no choice but to tackle this issue, some of our greatest minds are on the case. I can't help but think it will take all of them though.

Mushrooms Will Save The Planet

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: poptech

Published October 22, 2009 @ 02:01PM PT

No, that's not a typo. Nor is it a pitch to, as Timothy Leary might have asked "turn on, tune in and drop out." What it is instead is the principle that animates Ecovative Design, a new company using the mycelium roots of mushrooms in an attempt to completely eliminate styrofoam from the earth.

Ecovative founder Eben Bayer just gave the best fellows presentation at Pop!Tech so far. Their assertion is first, that styrofoam, or "toxic white stuff," as they refer to it, is killing our planet and setting our planet up for "systemic collapse."

Indeed, there is little as exemplary of our culture of waste as styrofoam. While it has a huge number of uses - insulation in homes, for example - it is mostly used for packaging, disposable cups, and all sorts of other byproducts of our lust for convenience.

Ecovative's assertion is that whatever replaces styrofoam needs to: come from multiple sources (so we're not setting ourselves up for disaster by relying entirely on one thing), have a lower cost in terms of CO2 (turns out that one cubic foot of styrofoam has the CO2 foot print of a gallon of gasoline), and has to participate in "nature's recycling system."

Not only is the idea good, the potential market makes me salivate. This is an example of a new product that could fundamentally disrupt a 20th century "unovation," and in the process, if they do it right, create a ton of financial value as well.

Check out the company here.

(Photo: Styrofoam mountain behind Tokyo fish market, by Complefixy)

America Reimagined Streaming Live

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: poptech

Published October 22, 2009 @ 12:32PM PT

After 24 hours of travel, I've arrived at Pop!Tech. For those of you who can't be here, the entire event is streaming live from their website.

http://poptech.com/live

Each day there are sets of themes, ranging from "The Invisible Made Visible" to "Teaching Change." Each set has 3-4 speakers, each of whom has twenty minutes to melt your brain, and who then participate in a final question and answer session with the audience.

Why Listening Is An Investor's Most Important Skill

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Opportunity Collaboration

Published October 21, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT

All entrepreneurs know the conference hustle. Figure out who has dough, try to figure out what they're interested in, craft an introduction or a scenario where you can be introduced, and try to make it rain. Often, however, investors - philanthropic or profit-motivated - make themselves extremely unavailable. While I understand how frustrating it can be for an investor to face the onslaught of requests, their unapproachability creates a frustrating and corrosive environment at many events

Which is why, at the risk of embarrassing him, I think more investors need to behave like Dave Perry. As Executive Director of the Peery Foundation, Dave has spent the last year or so becoming involved with the social entrepreneurship space. I've run into him now at a few conferences, and have noticed a most notable thing.

Dave displays a deep commitment to listening and learning. Throughout the last few days, he has been an active participant in sessions, and moreover, has taken the time to get to know a wide array of people. This notably includes the crowd of younger people here who are, frankly, not used to being given the time of day. This conference has done a great job of bringing out the most professionally egalitarian instincts in everyone, but Dave is still a model.

Why does this matter? It matters because successful people don't treat others as a means to an end, no matter how good that end is. They learn, discuss, and think about ways they can give as well as take. Being a financier for good projects is no excuse for one to act as though others are commodities. The time people like Dave takes to listen now, in addition to making it likely that he'll make better bets with his giving, will also engender good will that extends far past any grant cycle.

Photo: Even with pals like Muhammad Yunus, Dave Peery refuses to be too cool for school. Courtesy Peery Foundation

Pop!Tech 2009 Preview

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: poptech

Published October 21, 2009 @ 11:44AM PT

I leave Mexico today en route to Camden, Maine for another event that promises to be wonderful. Pop!Tech is a conference and an action network that helps social innovators accelerate their work. This will be my first year in attendance, and as I get ready to hop onto the four flights that will take me there, there are a few thing I'm most excited about.

First, I'm thrilled to meet all of the Social Innovation Fellows. The Pop!Tech innovation is a few year old program that brings together incredible world changers for a pre-conference training designed to jumpstart their work. I know fellows like FrontlineSMS:Medic's Josh Nesbit, but can't wait to meet the rest of them.

Second, I'm incredibly excited by the variety of brilliant speakers and performers. The list reads like a who's who of people you didn't know you needed to know about, but you do. It's hard to pinpoint just a few that I'm most excited about, but John Fetterman, the renegade Pennsylvania mayor trying to bring back his town by attracting an entirely new generation of artists and entrepreneurs has gotta be high on the list.

Third, I'm excited to see the staff in action. I've had the chance to hang out a bit with the Pop!Tech team at conferences and in their New York office (not to mention via Twitter), and they've always struck me as an incredibly motivated, kind group. Conferences tend to take on the characteristics of their staff, which only bodes well.

Finally, I'm excited for the setting. Camden, Maine, just about an hour and a half north of where I group up, is an unbelievably beautiful place. What's more, there are few better places to think about "America Reimagined" - this year's conference theme - than Maine. Maine is a place that combines a deep, rich tradition of libertarian independence with a deep live-and-let-live progressiveness. It is self-reliant in it's own imagination, yet as more and more young people leave for lack of jobs, it has been forced to get creative to attract and retain youth. And in just a couple short weeks, Maine voters may be the first group in the nation to ratify a state legislature's ruling in favor of allowing same-sex marriage.

As you'd expect, I'll be blogging throughout the event. Stay tuned.

(Photo: Tony the Misfit)