Monday, June 13, 2005

Hierarchy, Expertise, Awareness, Open Source, Blogging

I've been thinking quite a lot of the technological world and emerging interrelated networks, and how this applies in a power and political sense to spiritual communities, and more importantly to integral communities.

The last ten years, with the rise of Linux, the term "open source" has become known. This is the idea that written software that is open and viewable by all, is able to be easily fixed and improved upon by any person who has the requisite desire, skill, and persistence. In this case, all knowledge is in a sense, "shallow" - open to all who invest the time and energy.

I've alway thought that the term "open source" is (or should be) a beautiful term for spiritual knowledge. For example, the bookstore in Marin is called "Open Secret" - alluding to the fact that the supposed "secret" of enlightenment is open to all. There are many other examples of this, of course...

The other trend in technology (well, at least it used to be a trend - this is in debate now, given the tech crash of 2000, and the resulting consolidation) is that in modern work is that there is a lot of "flattening" in the decision making process - i.e. that there is less and less of a hierarchical overlay, top down structure, but more and more, functionally independent and overlapping ciricles of execution that get things done without a large "guiding hand", so to speak. You can see this in the statistics of more and more independent contractors, people working from their homes, etc.

What does this have to do with spirituality, politics, etc? more...

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