Steppin' Off The Edge

The following is a slightly tweaked version of the comments I closed out The Sharenomics Buffet which featured an interview with Alexandra Liss, Chelsea Rustrum and Gabriel Stempinski. Their book all about sharenomics, It’s a Shareable Life, and the Couch Surfing centric documentary, One Couch at a Time, should both be released very soon and I am quite looking forward to enjoying them.

I really like how Alexandra put it, that living with the sharing economy has allowed her to focus on her lifes’ passions. It doesn’t surprise me in the least to learn that Burning Man would be the catalyst for someone like Casey Fenton to explore his passion for travel and create a more socially minded system like Couch Surfing in the process. Couchsurfing, like Burning Man, helps people have more immediate, de-commodified experiences. Those two terms are both part of Burning Man’s ten principles and hallmarks of most sharing economy services. Even if there is an actual transaction involved, the services seek to have as few intermediaries involved as possible between the service sharer and receiver.

I think that the common thread between Burning Man and what the best of all of these digital sharing economy services aspire to be is that both are community hubs. In some form or method the event or website articulates the value exchange or interests which the community members share or self-identify with as part of their personal philosophical outlook on life. Burners are passionate about art and the immediate experience, WOOFing is for those who want to gain and share organic food skills / knowledge, couch surfers have the wanderlust for travel and on and on it goes. Even those services like AirBNB which have a surface value proposition that focuses primarily on profits allows their members to explore their own passions through reduced financial concerns. As Chelsea so greatly stated “The reason you start to share is to save money, the reason you continue is because it feels good”

I can see why Tony Bennett left his heart in San Francisco! I have been in the Bay Area for the last week attending multiple conferences during the days and meeting up for incredible podcast interviews at night. The weather has been absolutely fantastic in what constitutes early spring for the locals but feels like [...]

My very weird winter weekend began last Friday when I awoke to Mother Nature letting a flurry of her finest snow fly down. By the time all was said and done close to a foot had fallen and taken the power with it. It would wrap up with an unfortunately sad and traumatic experience as I sat in m car in -17 weather at the end of my driveway waiting for the police to come and help a deer that had been hit and run to continue on to a better next life. It was obvious to me and the few drivers who slowed down at the sight of my hazard lights that this magestic animal was not going to see another day. This post is a bit of a mixed bag of thoughts that I took note of during said day without power. With the winter weather top of mind, it concludes with a few thoughts on financial policies have frozen many peoples access to the resources they need to survive that are created by institutions that dominate the financial forest today and how decentralization initiatives can thaw it all out.

Happy New Year! The design I launched steppinofftheedge.com initially with in late 2010 drew its’ inspiration from several cartoon graphics from openclipart.org; to visually tell the tale of the steps that science and history books tell us is the path humanity has travelled: Humble beginnings as cave dwelling proto-humans Through fantasytic stories of ancient religions [...]

As I mentioned at the end of the last podcast, Justin, KMO and I all use the open source audio editing software Audacity to put together shows. The learning curve on it isn’t that steep and after a few episodes I felt like I was pretty consistent with the quality of audio. There was one process in particular that I found myself doing manually via mouse repeatedly that I figured there must be a better way. It was happening more frequently in the last episode interview + the upcoming one as I’ve been getting over a cold and don’t always manage to mute the microphone. This post covers how to setup AutoHotKey to do keyboard + mouse macros to save time in editing with Audacity.

John Michael Greer is a Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, repeat guest of the C-Realm podcast, and very prolific blogger / author. Sitting down with ample time to explore one of his essays will usually open your eyes to a new perspective on an important part of the world, its’ [...]

Dangerous Minds | Occupy Wall Street teach-in with Douglas Rushkoff. OWS Teach-In with Douglas Rushkoff from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo. For more from Rushkoff, check out Civilizations Control Panel – episode 2 of the podcast with him.

The unfortunate truth for radical monopolies is that their continued search for better ways to create better things to sell to a constantly evolving community of citizens is that they are sowing the seeds of their own demise with every next new greatest product or process. Staying strictly within the realm of information for this exploration, the desire to efficiently distribute the one-to-many technologies has built up entire industries that have gone on to provide printers, microphones, cameras and video cameras to the masses in form factors that can fit in your pocket. This has given authors, orators, journalists, artists and everyone the ability to capture and create a wide variety of alternative media. Mixed with computers and the potentially democratizing force of a network architecture of the Internet, now anyone with a computer or smart phone can receive, re-mix and respond to the thoughts and topics of someone on the other side of the planet as easily as they can converse with a friend across a table. The power of such electronic platforms is that an individual now has almost equal opportunity to share their thoughts as the largest corporations.

Scrolling through the SotE Twitter feed yesterday (@StepOffTheEdge), I felt like the various links which those I follow were sharing were such an interesting mix that they deserved further follow-up. Like past summary review posts it gives a little look at what types of information are flying through my echo chamber of late. Who: Extraenvironmentalist’s [...]

“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” That quote from J.B.S. Haldane has been re-told in various forms over the years and for good reason. What is creativity? Where does inspiration come from? How can I continue to exist if every cell of my body changes over time? Why is anything solid when there is more space between the stuff that makes it up than actual stuff itself? Is it really possible that all of the stuff that makes up all of humanity could fit into the size of a sugar cube if you could remove that space?