I'm afraid I make threads too noisy with my talking. I hope that people have learned to glance and skim. I don't mean to cause headaches and derailment of threads.

The thought that occurs to me about this proposal is lets get on with it. Pull a random number to determine the partner area for Richard's locale and lets see what we can make of it.

Right now there is a core group of people interested in the WWC. I don't think I'm alone in not really understanding lots of it, and not alone in being eager and willing to see where all this goes.

I've got several thoughts rolling around in my head and they don't all seem related, but I'll try to get them out and perhaps there's something which connects them and makes for relevant conversation.

Rene Dubos is often credited with the aphorism:

Think globally, Act locally.

The Internet allows us to be in conversations with people all around the world. In some sense to act globally in ways never before possible. Does that make moot the thrust of Dubos call? I think it does not. Thinking ecologically still requires appropriate responsibility to our local environments. Dubos's call was to recognize ourselves as a living part of our living local environments. But ecological thinking also makes what we've long known, that our fate is inextricably linked to others, more apparent than ever. What happens to one of us happens to all of us. Our fate togetehr indeed depends upon it. Thinking globally suggests that communities around the world ought to be engaged in conversation. Our local environments provide us with necessary information about how to live but our attention must also be drawn to the larger whole. Our responsibility is to better engage and understand where we fit both on the very local scale and at the global scale.

David's project began with the question: What if we shared poverty? It's a profound question because just by asking it our constructs about sharing and poverty are transformed.

In discussing the WWC the question is always how to publicize? That's only half the question the read part of the read/write Web. Okay, I understand that we cannot depend on the Internet entirely. But I do think that the very idea of the WWC is wrapped up with the change that the Internet has made in our ability to engage in conversations anywhere in the world. I believe that the World Wide Web is a central metaphor for the WWC. The metaphor of the read/write Web is essential for thinking about how the WWC will operate. So the read part is only half of it. The problem with with concepts of brochures is they tend to obscure the write part. All the media, whatever its form, must have both parts: call and response. A brochure telling about the WWC is broken without specific ways to respond. The essence of the WWC is as a many to many medium.

Another question that comes up is something along the lines: How can we talk across the oceans when within the boundaries of my local people don't even engage with each other?

This to me signals one of the profound effects that the WWC might can have. By focusing attention far away, the attention is necessarily reflected back to one's own community. How people within their WWC areas approach this attention to their locales, perhaps, contains the greatest benefit of all in participation. It's good to pay attention to the ways that communities can engage across great distances, but attention also must be focused on engagement on the local level.

The Isle of Man issue was interesting to me because it shows how diverse--even fractured-- localities are. Many of the WWC areas probably encompass groups of people who hate each other. I suppose nothing concentrates the mind so much as a common enemy, but maybe common friends can be engaging too. In any case among the important issues that communities across distances will engage is how these communities develop avenues for engagement within their local communities.

An article written right at the beginning of the WWW caught my imagination then, but it was seven years or so after first reading the article that I got online and the relevancy of the ideas were brought home. In 1992 Elin Whitney-Smith published The vindication of Karl Marx. Through my threads here everyone knows that I'm famously lazy. Marxism is something that never engaged me because it always seemed too much work! Really Whitney-Smith's article is not about Marxism at all. She uses an imaginary conversation between Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin as a trope to say something interesting about work and how new communications technologies might change things.

Another interesting twist the article provides is a different perspective about alienation. Whitney-Smith provides a short history of the ways that production have been organized. One approach Whitney-Smith uses is to tell the story of the development of the factory system through the story of Jack Newbury the weaver's apprentice who becomes a textile magnate. After Marx tells the story in Whitney-Smith's tale, Lenin protests that alienation is "the curse of capitalism." Marx responds in part:

"Yes, Vladimir, I know. The notion of alienation has taken on all kinds of meanings. But the original meaning, that a thing stands forth as separate, alien, is still a good meaning. Before a thing is alienated it is not distinct from the person as a social being. This is true if we are talking about production or about labor. And after all, in Jack of Newbury's time, it was much the same thing."

With fractured communities and gross inequities worldwide imagining any possible positive meaning of alienation provides sort of a jolt. Whitney-Smith notes how the development of communications allowed processes of production to be set apart and then managed. Clearly the managers gained wealth and prestige. But she shows how the advancements of communications technology will also have effects on managers. She puts words in the mouth of Marx again:

"There will be economic crisis. Where decisions are made by workers who know the product, know the customer, and see the benefit of the result in their pockets, business will survive. Where decisions are made by the top of the hierarchy for the benefit of capital accumulation, business will fail. Computers turn the hierarchy upside-down. Decision making is the last function of ownership. Capitalists are dependent on workers to control the means of production, so workers will be as owners."

It's such a clever article. On the other hand, I suspect that any association with Marx tends to be avoided in many circles. It's important to understand that her story isn't really Marxist, just that it uses Marx to tell a story. The important upshot of the story is how the hierarchy is turned upside down.

Globalization is viewed by so many as a destructive force carried out by capital and predatory corporations. What the WWC can help to accomplish is the realization that we all can be empowered as decision makers.

What most people think is globalization is a race to the bottom. Capital will seek out cheaper and cheaper labor for the production of products. And most people have no trouble imagining the crisis: How will buy products when everyone is poor? Cheap oil has made us think there's no problem with shipping washing machines tens of thousands of miles; or to think nothing of shipping corn vast distances. But oil will not be cheap forever. Even if it were to be cheap our atmosphere cannot absorb the carbon such a system requires. As we explore new energy systems, our attention is necessarily drawn closer to home.

Here in America where everything is premised on cheap oil the looming change is is devastating. It literally is making people crazy. Some people imagine that we can bully our way ahead. So there is a batch of psychopathic insanity. While others are depressed into inaction, so another sort of crazy is manifested in depression which freezes any action. The responsible path towards sanity seems to me through recognizing ourselves as decision makers. So what is exciting to me about the WWC is not sharing poverty, but sharing across local division and across great distances our becoming responsible decision makers.