I've been in various discussions over the years about how to either create or do-better-at group-forming for support groups, collaborations, scenes, hubs/nexus, movement, or innovation, huge invention to solve grand challenges, or progress and evolution via collective intelligence and collective action... (more)

Why the Rolling Stones Wanted to Silence Robert Frank (Hint: Group Sex). Frank, who died on Monday Sept. 9 at the age of 94... he was a photographer who, in mid-career, having cemented a reputation as one of the premier street photographers of the 20th century, turned his back on that and took up filmmaking and then in late life a sort of photo collage wherein handwritten text was scrawled across the images. (more)

Malcolm Gladwell on Saturday Night Live, German philosophy, the Lunar Men, and other examples of the "social dimension of Innovation". When they were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly-in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative-a mutual-admiration society... One person's passion-be it carriages, steam, minerals, chemistry, clocks-fired all the others. There was no neat separation of subjects... What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence... Jenny Uglow's book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states-the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity-you create an environment (the BlogWeb?) both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. Is this a Creative Network or Social Network? A Network Of Learning? cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress.

Edward Glaeser focuses on the connection Joel Mokyr sees in his book The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 ISBN:9780300124552 between the Enlightenment and the Industrial Age. “What is new here,” he writes, “is not an argument that the Enlightenment changed history, for better and/or worse, but that its economic effects on the wealth-creating capabilities of the affected societies have been overlooked.” Mokyr has long emphasized the economic value of new ideas and he thus emphasizes that “Britain’s intellectual sphere had turned into a competitive market for ideas, in which logic and evidence were becoming more important and ‘authority’ as such was on the defensive.” (more)

The Lunar Society was a discussion club, of a number of prominent industrialists and scientists, who met regularly in the latter half of the 18th century in Birmingham, England. The society's name came from their practice of scheduling their meetings at the time of the full moon (in that time of no street lighting, the extra light made the journey home easier)... Despite this uncertainty, fourteen individuals have been identified as having verifiably attended Lunar Society meetings regularly over a long period during its most productive eras: these are Matthew Boulton, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Samuel Galton, Jr., Robert Augustus Johnson, James Keir, Joseph Priestley, William Small, Jonathan Stokes, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, John Whitehurst and William Withering. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society see also Lunar Men (more)

The transcendentals (Latin: transcendentalia) are the properties of being that correspond to three aspects of the human field of interest and are their ideals; science (truth), the arts (beauty) and religion (goodness). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals cf Plato, Transcendentalist (more)

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in the New England region of the United States.[1][2][3] A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature,[1] and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism

US equivalent (but predecessor) of the UK Bloomsbury Group, at least as framed by Susan Cheever in her book American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work ISBN:0743264622. The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman's petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation's history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement. The Transcendentalists...

The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA),[2][4] commonly known as the Royal Society of Arts, is a London-based organisation committed to finding practical solutions to social challenges.[5][6][1] The RSA's mission expressed in the founding charter was to "embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce", but also of the need to alleviate poverty and secure full employment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society_of_Arts (more)

book by Steven Johnson ISBN:1594489254 (more)

Networked Non-Market Inventions: Steven Johnson framing/quadrant from Where Good Ideas Come From (more)

Steven Johnson book, ISBN:978-1-59448-771-2. This 2010 book adduces seven conditions (patterns) that enable discoveries and inventions (Huge Invention, Breakthrough, Generative), each of which gets its own chapter. (more)

Steven Johnson's 2012 book Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age ISBN:1594488207 (more)

stock in a company held by employees (founds and others) (more)

It seems like Gmail is Blocking Some FluxGarden Registration Emails - got a few bounces today with 550 5.7.26 This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM. (more)

Amazon rule to keep teams as Small Teams. (more)

Donald Trump phrase/supporter

Brink Lindsey sees Libertarian folks moving from Republican to Democratic parties. Libertarian-leaning voters started drifting away from the GOP even before Katrina, civil war in Iraq, and Mark Foley launched the general stampede. (more)

John Higgs: The High Priest and the Great Beast: Timothy Leary's Belief That He Was a 'Continuation' of Aleister Crowley. In 1972 Dr. Tim Leary picked up a pack of Aleister Crowley-designed tarot cards and asked them the question, “Who am I and what is my destiny?” He then cut the pack and found the Ace of Discs, the card that Crowley believed represented himself (more)

Tales From the Andy Warhol Factory. He went into Pop Art because he saw that Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein started to get all that attention. (more)