This is not a new idea. It is the title of Whole Foods’ mission/vision statement, so I take no credit for the phrase. It is an important idea, though.
It came to mind on Monday night while at the EFF Austin party, Plutopia. As I consider the connections and shared vibe between the whole Grateful Dead scene, which I called home for many years, and the current tech-tribe that gathers around SXSW/Burning Man, etc., I now see the central role of the EEF and its founders, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor.
Particularly Barlow. John Perry Barlow is not only a spokesperson for the interdependencies that make up web communities world wide, he was also one of the main lyricists for the Grateful Dead for most of its run and a founding member of the Grateful Dead Family. Go to the Dead’s site today, and there he is listed as a band member.
The connections are all in the values.
For example, in The Declaration of the Independence of CyberSpace (1996), Barlow wrote:
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
And from The Economy of Ideas (published in Wired in 1996), he suggests that ‘information is a relationship,’ and he continues, saying:
I believe one idea is central to understanding liquid commerce: Information economics, in the absence of objects, will be based more on relationship than possession.
The tags here are FREEDOM, INDEPENDENCE, and RELATIONSHIPS.
These are the memes of interdependence. It is really cool that, though the technologies that are enabling this interdependence are evolving rapidly, the cultural impulse for it has rich history… Twittering our way back to the garden?
The Butcher
Leave a Reply