LA Metro: Promoting Mass Transit from EMBARQ Network on Vimeo.

Part 2

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

What do the “M”s in Generation M stand for? The first is for a movement. It’s a little bit about age — but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from.

Gen M isn’t just kind of awesome — it’s vitally necessary. If you think the “M”s sound idealistic, think again.

The great crisis isn’t going away, changing, or “morphing.” It’s the same old crisis — and it’s growing.

You’ve failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.

But they’re your institutions, not ours. You made them — and they’re broken. Here’s what I mean:

“… For example, the auto industry has cut back production so far that inventories have begun to shrink — even in the face of historically weak demand for motor vehicles. As the economy stabilizes, just slowing the pace of this inventory shrinkage will boost gross domestic product, or GDP, which is the nation’s total output of goods and services.”

Clearing the backlog of SUVs built on 30-year-old technology is going to pump up GDP? So what? There couldn’t be a clearer example of why GDP is a totally flawed concept, an obsolete institution. We don’t need more land yachts clogging our roads: we need a 21st Century auto industry.

I was (kind of) kidding about seceding before. Here’s what it looks like to me: every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy — and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century – or the 21st?

Love,

Umair and the Edge Economy Community

(via Harvard Business)

This image has been popping up on a lot of news sites lately. It’s being reported as if it represents some kind of movement, and is drawing constant comparison to Shepard Fairey’s now historical election poster. Many ideas are floating around as to what it actually means, but liberals claiming racism and violence toward the President seem to be the loudest of voices. While I share their disgust of the belligerent red-faced “birthers” waiving their guns around, I think it’s completely unfair and hypocritical to attack this image. Here’s why:

The poster is an attempt to link Obama to the right’s completely paranoid charges of extremism, wildly erratic behavior, and robbery by taxation. I don’t believe it is racist or violent, only implying the unintelligible argument that our president is a loose cannon hell bent on destroying the country. It doesn’t represent a movement whatsoever, as street art has been hijacked by advertising nerds and is just a gimmick to sell clients on phony street cred. Sounds like Michael Steele’s M.O. to me.

My hunch is that the image was just made by some graphic designer trying to make a name for himself. He did a few little wheat pastes, took a few pictures, and now everyone’s talking about this like it’s some kind of underground political movement. I find it silly that the image has received the amount of press that it has, considering the way “guerilla” ad campaigns and “grass roots demonstrations” are easily purchased and staged these days. Not to mention the image has been done before.

I like to consider that the poster might even be satirical in nature, taking a stab at the foam-mouthed paranoia that currently dominates our political discourse. In this context I actually like the image very much. But then again, I do have a soft spot for comic book villains. Everybody calm down, you can’t cry foul every time someone takes a shot at YOUR guy. It’s actually sort of… funny.

reuse reclaim recycle

this is tres birds workshop hierarchical approach to Architecture / Building

3330 Larimer was an unoccupied concrete industrial storage building when we started our manipulation of it this month. Primarily, we are opening up the structure to the Sun. We started by demolishing a 50ft x 12ft opening on the Larimer St. façade to gather solar heat in the winter and provide day lighting all year. Luckily for the future occupant there are views of the Rocky Mountains through this new opening. Next, we punctured the roof with ten 2ft diameter holes to allow day lighting on both floor levels. Why all the concrete cutting, roof puncturing, and effort for day light? We are doing it for the health of the humans that will work there. 93% of Americans daily life is indoors. Sunlight is different from artificial light. It possesses the full spectrum of colors within its rays which provides us with health.

Over the next month we will be insulating the building, installing high efficiency electric powered cooling and lighting, and making the interior bright white. This once dark / energy gluten will become light and nimble. Building operations in America account for 75% of our countries electricity use. That bothers me as a participant in making buildings. We will be making our own electricity on site to run the cooling, plug loads (computers/ tools/ task lighting) , and artificial lighting for the night owls. A rooftop 20Kwh solar photovoltaic system will run this 12000 sq ft building on Larimer St.

I think this project is a good example of how we Americans should be developing this country into the future. We need to take existing buildings that are empty and not working and insert day light, heating / cooling efficiency, and energy production on site.

Revitalize what we have.

I would like to end our sprawl into agricultural lands now and minimize our use of natural resources.

reuse

Our faith in electronic technology will enable us to achieve a more sustainable and enjoyable earthly existence.  With modern technology we will find a way to get off the crack-like fossil fuels we’ve become so dependent upon.  Our improvements in electronics will allow our individual and collective efficiency to continue to increase.  We will make more – faster and in a seemingly smarter manner.

But, will we really improve our human experience in the process?  Seems like it, but we’re going to have to find a way to manage our e-waste first, and merely shipping it overseas for another people to contend with is certainly not the answer.

Managing our e-waste is going to be one of the most important steps in continuing to improve our human experience. Unfortunately, every time one piece of our technology is improved another is rendered obsolete.  This obsolete technology is then shipped far, far away – out of sight out of mind, where it inversely impacts the lives and well being of others.   We must continue to take responsibility and find more efficient ways to reduce, reuse, and process and recycle our e-waste.

The good news is, change is afoot… Design the 4th Bin.

How and where to recycle all of your gadgets

Here is what the adminstration of Sarkozy came up with for Paris…

Interesting to think about how a Cold War symbol like Capitan America and the story of his origins is translated into another language…

Part 2