Fusion Baby, Fusion

I hope I'm not the only one who thinks this sounds way too much like Spider Man 2...

http://www.physorg.com/news67442282.html

Treo Trifecta

It's been a while since I mused geek on any one particularly gadget, but the new Treo 700p has got me psyched. Not because of any one particular geekfeat it has, but rather the cultimation of a treo of key capabilities we've been promised in a mobile device for some time:

- broadband wireless speeds (w/tethering)
- decent video/audio recording (pics/vids/audio)
- software expandability

At present I get 2/3 of those with my hacked Moto e815. And for the past year having broadband speeds near everywhere, never worrying about where I might pick up WiFi has been nice. But the lack of software expandability has kept my old Treo 600 close by as a fallback.

Now, with Motorola's Q set to launch next week, the real excitement is the possibility that 06' will be the start of that new generation of mobile devices that live up to the standard manufacturers were promising us 3 years ago... true media, broadband-connected, in your pocket.

The generation of true mobile wireless media has begun.

EBS DOA?

So I just heard an emergency broadcast warning come over the air... tornado watch now in effect. Yikes. Scary stuff, right?

But this was Internet radio. Broadcasting out of North Carolina... and here I am looking out the window for a twister in Connecticut?

This brings up an interesting paradigm... what exactly is the purpose of our trusty emergency broadcast system in a world of satelite and streaming audio? What's the definition of "local" in a world abstracted from geography, where location is becoming less and less relevant?

Seriously people, what's a person listening to this station in Oregon supposed to think... "Oh man... board up the windows, we've got a class 3 tornado headed our way!"

A better use of the EBS in our digital age? "Code yellow... class 5 packet storm coming across your local subnet."

Nations. Corporations. People.

Weekend excursion to the NYC for the 06' Romanian Festival with The Bogdan Bunch. Plenty of adventures there, but on the way home we get debating about where our society is headed in an era where governments are growing increasingly incapable of providing for their people, as new challenges from corporations and technology slowly blur the line between public and private, citizens and stakeholders.

Now I don't consider myself political, but Bo's thesis on the rise of international corporations and coming collapse of the nation-state is something I've heard more than once. Graduate business classes are flush with talk on the exponential rise in power of international corporations.

This is not our parents' planet plan. E-commerce has grown up. Global markets are in full-effect. And the Internet is rapidly evolving into the global human connector it always promised it would be from day one.

The power of governments weilding the mantle of large-scale standing armies, geographic borders, and nationalist trade alliances are already in rapid decline. A decent 12 year old hacker with a T1 and an agenda wields more power to bring down a nation than an army of green suits and M16s.

I believe the MBA classes are wrong. The transition from nation-state to international corporations is just the beginning. IC's represent merely the most logical bridge from the nation-state to the virtual-state. In the true virtual-state, we'll understand that a global network of ubiquitiously-connected, geographically-impartial, and highly-informed global citizens are more powerful than even the most nimble, armed, or wealthy government or corporate entity. It is the power of true democracy incarnate. When everyone has a voice, the precepts of power change. When everyone's connected, the rules of profit and exploitation fall apart.

Doubt not. The writing's on the wall. The intersection of nations and corporations is old news. The struggle for power between corporations and individuals has now begun. Examples...

• Wars on individuals over copyright infringement.
• Wars on time through expectations of longer hours at the office.
• Outsourcing of employer-directed defined-benefit to employee-directed defined-contribution retirement plans.
• Liberation of citizens from corporations as their only source of income/wealth.
• Immiment collapse of the social security system as a fall-back or lifestyle.
• Unplugging of workers from corporate office infrastructures in favor of Starbucks, Kinkos, and high-speed, ubiquitious mobile networks.
  
• Retirement of the physical for the virtual space as one's community one-stop (ie: the MySpace/Facebook phenomenon).
  

The power of corporation in the virtual world represents the ability to establish and enhance human connectivity. Those vying to squeeze lemonade out of the proverbial command and control model have a lot to discover about their role in The New World...

Connect now.
Profit later.
People first.

Ubiquitize Perfection

Driving range. 6pm. Temps in the swank 70s. Golf clubs still dirty from over a year ago and yet suddenly things click. The perfect swing, contact, lift-off. It may not happen much, but when it does I know this...

There is a perfection in all things.

Most of us only get to see it for a second. We call it "luck" because if we didn't we could not explain it. We'd get confused and the perfection of our imperfectionist perspective wouldn't really make sense anymore. The concept of inherent imperfection would break. Thus, in the magic of the moment, we look away. "Just a fluke" we say.. and hack quickly at the next ball to justify the illusion of our shoddy paradigm.

So I'm listening to the The Magic of Thinking Big audiobook this weekend. Nothing too revolutionary here, but it occurs to me how virtually every one of these self-dev books focus on one thing above all else: breaking free of our own mental limitations. Stripping away these imperfection layers that have been so ingrained in our heads, like peeling back the layers of the onion. I have my own thoughts about where this comes from that I'll cover later, but for now the core question is this:

What could we do if our minds knew no limits?

Traditional psychology often makes this merely an issue of personal development, but clearly it affects much more than that. Ingenuitity. Progress. Ideas. Evolution. How many great things lost in the depths of our minds merely because the voice in the back of our heads politely reminds, "Nah, that'll never work." A favorite quote of mine says this,

You see things as they are and ask why.
But I, I see things that never were and ask why not?

Here's to a lot more "why nots?" in our world.