Whether the early Quakers were consciously trying to start a social movement or not is a moot point. Most likely they were not. They were merely seeking to give consistent expression to their belief in the equality of all men as spiritual sons of God. The Quaker custom of marking a fixed price on merchandise so that all men would pay the same price is another case in point. Most probably Friends did this simply because they wanted to be fair to all who frequented their shops and give the sharp bargainer no advantage at the expense of his less skilled brother. It is unlikely that many Quakers adopted fixed prices in the hope of forcing their system on a business world interested only in profit. That part was just coincidence, the coincidence being that Friends hit upon it because of their convictions; the system itself was a natural success.
— Bruce L Pearson, Feb 4 1956

Consensus decision-making’s little-known religious origins shed light on why this activist practice has persisted so long despite being unwieldy, off-putting, and ineffective.

All that said, it’s hard for me not to roll my eyes while reading this. Perhaps I just sat in on too many meetings in my twenties where the Trotskyists berated the pacifists for slow process (and tried to take over meetings) and the black bloc anarchists berated pacifists for not being brave enough to overturn dumpsters. As often as not these shenanigans torpedoed any chance of real coalition building but the most boring part were the interminable hours-long meetings about styles. A lot of it was fashion, really, when you come down to it.

This piece just feels so…. 1992 to me. Like: we’re still talking about this? Really? Like: really? Much of evidence Kauffmann cites dates back to the frigging Clamshell Alliance—I’ve put the Wikipedia link to the 99.9% of my readers who have never heard of this 1970s movement. More recently she talks about a Food Not Bombs manual from the 1980s. The language and continued critique over largely forgotten movements from 40 years ago doesn’t quite pass the Muhammad Ali test:

Consensus decision making is a tool, but there’s no magic to it. It can be useful but it can get bogged down. Sometimes we get so enamored of the process that we forget our urgent cause. Clever people can use it to manipulate others, and like any tool those who know how to use it have an advantage over those who don’t. It can be a tribal marker, which gives it a great to pull together people but also introduces a whole set of dynamics that dismisses people who don’t fit the tribal model. These are universal human problems that any system faces.

Consensus is just one model of organizing. When a committed group uses it for common effect, it can pull together and coordinate large groups of strangers more quickly and creatively than any other organizing method I’ve seen.

Just about every successful movement for social change works because it builds a diversity of supporters who will use all sorts of styles toward a common goal: the angry youth, the African American clergy, the pacifist vigilers, the shouting anarchists. But change doesn’t only happen in the streets. It’s also swirling through the newspaper rooms, attorneys general offices, investor boardrooms. We can and should squabble over tactics but the last thing we need is an enforcement of some kind of movement purity that “calls for the demise” of a particular brand of activist culture. Please let’s leave the lefty purity wars in the 20th century.

So we’ve been asked to write a “synchroblog” organized by Quaker Voluntary Service. It is a weekday and there are work deadlines looming for me (there are always deadlines looming) so my participation may be spotty but I’ll give it a shot.

The topic of this particular synchroblog is Friends and social media and in the invite we were asked to riff on comparisons with early Friends’s pamphleteering and the web as the new printing press. I’m spotty on the details of the various pamphlet wars of early Friends but the web-as-printing-press is a familiar theme.

I first mangled the metaphors of web as printing press nineteen years ago. That summer I started my first new media project to get pacifist writings online. The metaphors I used seem as funny now as they were awkward then, but give me a break: Mark Zuckerberg was a fifth grader hacking Ataris and even the word “weblog” was a couple of years away. I described my project as “web typesetting for the movement by the movement” and one of my selling points is that I had done the same work in the print world.

Fractured as my metaphors were, online media was more like publishing then that it is now. Putting an essay online required technical skills and comparatively high equipment costs. The consistent arc of consumer technology has been to make posting ever easier and cheaper and that has moved the bar of quality (raised or lowered depending on how you see it)

Back in the mid-1990s I remember joking snarkily with friends that we’d all someday have blogs devoted to pictures of our cats and kids–the humor in our barbs came from the ridiculousness that someone would go to the time and expense to build a site so ephemeral and non-serious. You’d have to take a picture, develop the film, digitally scan it in, touch it up with a prohibitively expensive image software, use an FTP program to upload it to a web server and then write raw HTML to make a web page of it. But the joke was on us. In 2014, if my 2yo daughter puts something goofy on her head, I pull out the always-with-me phone, snap a picture, add a funny caption and filter, tag it, and send it to a page which is effectively a photoblog of her life.

The ease of posting has spawned an internet culture that’s creatively bizarre and wonderful. With the changes the printing press metaphor has become less useful, or at least more constrained. There are Friends who’s intentionality and effort make them internet publishers (I myself work for Friends Journal). But most of our online activity is more like water cooler chitchat.

So the question I have is this: are there ways Friends should behave online. If we are to “let our lives preach,” as the much-quoted George Fox snippet says, what’s our online style? Do we have anything to learn from earlier times of pamphleteering? And what about the media we’re using, especially as we learn more about electronic surveillance and its widespread use both here at home and in totalitarian regimes?

Animated gifs have grown up. They make up half the posts on Tumblr. They are often derived from funny scenes in movies and come with humorous captions. The Planet Money piece uses them for storytelling: text is illustrated by six gifs showing different parts of the recycling process. The movement helps tell the story–indeed most of the shots would be visually uninteresting if they were static.

The short loops reminds me of Vine, the six-second video service from Twitter which I’ve used a lot for silly kid antics. They can also tell a simple story (they’re particularly well suited to repetitive kid antics: up the steps, down the slide, up the steps, down the slide, up…).

In my work with Friends Journal I’ve done some 7–12 minute video interviews with off-site authors using Google Hangouts, which essentially just records the video conversation. It’s fine for what we use it for, but the quality depends a lot on the equipment on the other end. If the bandwidth is low or the webcam poor quality, it will show, and there are few options for post-production editing. But honestly, this is why I use Hangouts: a short web-only interview won’t turn into a weeklong project.

Producing high-quality video requires controlling all of the equipment, shooting ten times more footage than you think you’ll need, and then hours of work condensing and editing it down to a story. And after all this it’s possible you’ll end up with something that doesn’t get many views. Few Youtube users actually watch videos all the way through to the end, drifting away to other internet distractions in the first few minutes.

I like the combination of the simple short video clips (whether Vine or animated gif) wedded to words. My last post here was the very light-weight story about a summer afternoon project. Yesterday, I tried again, shooting a short animated gif of Tibetan monks visiting a local meetinghouse. I don’t think it really worked. They’re constructing a sand mandala grain-by-grain. The small movements of their funnel sticks as sand drops is so small that a regular static photo would suffice. But I’ll keep experimenting with the form.

Religious wars, religious dress, religious money – these are the real and yet superbly complex elements of our cultural existence. Scout any crack or cranny of popular culture and you find religion creating a glorious maze of topics for writers to discover and sift and sing to the masses.

But lately, I find that a repulsive plague of repetition and banality has swept over the disenchanted cybersphere. Each day I begin my religion news search with hopeful eagerness, sifting closely through mainstream and fringe outlets, hungry for signs of a new trend, movement, argument, study–anything other than what I consumed the day before. But I search in vain, and my doldrums have led me to take action.

(H/T to David Watt on Facebook)

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A Quaker presence at Occupy London
Almost 100 Quakers attended a Meeting for Worship on the steps of saint Paul’s cathedral in London on Sunday afternoon. The Meeting for Worship took place in support of the Occupy London movement that…

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Steve Jobs on his major mistake during Apple’s troubled years: “Letting profitability outweigh passion” http://huff.to/nNHjGY #ditto (a tweet by @stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Jobs’ death I’ve been thinking a lot about O’Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most.

Here’s the money quote from the article:

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products,” Jobs told Isaacson. “[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, “a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now.”

“That’s what Walt Disney did,” said Jobs, “and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.“
All of our greatest work at O’Reilly has been driven by passion and idealism. That includes our early forays into publishing, when we were a documentation consulting company to pay the bills but wrote documentation on the side for programs we used that didn’t have any good manuals. It was those manuals, on topics that no existing tech publisher thought were important, that turned us into a tech publisher “who came out of nowhere.”

In the early days of the web, we were so excited about it that +Dale Dougherty wanted to create an online magazine to celebrate the people behind it. That morphed into GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the web’s first portal and first commercial ad-supported site.

In the mid-90s, realizing that no one was talking about the programs that were behind all our most successful books, I brought together a collection of free software leaders (many of whom had never met each other) to brainstorm a common story. That story redefined free software as open source, and the world hasn’t been the same since. It also led to a new business for O’Reilly, as we launched our conference business to help bring visibility to these projects, which had no company marketing behind them.

Thinking deeply about open source and the internet got me thinking big ideas about the internet as operating system, and the shift of influence from software to network effects in data as the key to future applications. I was following people who at the time seemed “crazy” — but they were just living in a future that hadn’t arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I formulated our company mission of “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.”

In 2003, in the dark days after the dot com bust, our company goal for the year was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer business. Two outcomes of that effort did just that: +Sara Winge ‘s creation of Foo Camp spawned a worldwide, grassroots movement of self-organizing “unconferences,” and our Web 2.0 Conference told a big story about where the net was going and what distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that preceded it.

In 2005, seeing the passion that was driving garage inventors to a new kind of hardware innovation, Dale once again wanted to launch a magazine to celebrate the passionate people behind the movement. This time, it was a magazine: Make: (http://makezine.com), and a year later, we launched Maker Faire (http://makerfaire.com) as a companion event. 150,000 people attended Maker Faires last year, and the next generation of startups is emerging from the ferment of the movement that Dale named.

Meanwhile, through those dark years after the dotcom bust, we also did a lot of publishing just to keep the company afloat. (With a small data science team at O’Reilly, we built a set of analytical tools that helped us understand the untapped opportunities in computer book publishing. We realized that we were playing in only about 2/5 of the market; moving into other areas that we had never been drawn to helped pay the bills, but never sparked the kind of creativity as the areas that we’d found by following our passion.)

It was at this time that I formulated an image that I’ve used many times since: profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great persistence of Steve Jobs, there’s a lesson for all of us in it.

What’s so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making enormous amounts of money without making it a primary goal of the company. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) Contrast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 financial crisis, who were focused only on making money for themselves, while taking advantage of others in the process.

Making money through true value creation driven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a better place — that’s the heart of what is best in capitalism. (See also the wonderful HBR blog post, Steve Jobs and the Purpose of the Corporation. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/steve_jobs_and_the_purpose_of.html I also got a lot of perspective on this topic from +Leander Kahney’s book, Inside Steve’s Brain http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Steves-Brain-Leander-Kahney/dp/1591841984 )

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What Steve Jobs Learned From His Biggest Failure
Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs traces the Apple co-founder’s career in Silicon Valley–from its soaring highs to its crushing lows. Jobs has been hailed as a tech visionary, but …

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Today Jaime Johnson tweeted out a link to a new piece by Rachel Held Evans called “The Future of Evangelicalism.” She does a nice job parsing out the differences between the two camps squaring off over Rob Bell. On the one side is a centralized movement of neo-Calvinists she calls Young, Restless, Reformed after a 2006 Christianity Today article. I have little to no interest in this crowd except for mild academic curiosity. But the other side is what she’s dubbing “the new evangelicals”:

The second group—sometimes referred to as “the new evangelicals” or “emerging evangelicals” or “the evangelical left” is significantly less organized than the first, but continues to grow at a grassroots level. As Paul Markhan wrote in an excellent essay about the phenomenon, young people who identify with this movement have grown weary of evangelicalism’s allegiance to Republican politics, are interested in pursuing social reform and social justice, believe that the gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and are eager to be a part of inclusive, diverse, and authentic Christian communities. “Their broadening sense of social responsibility is pushing them to rethink many of the fundamental theological presuppositions characteristic of their evangelical traditions,” Markham noted.

This is the group that intrigues me. There’s a lot of cross-over here with some of what I’m seeing with Quakers. In an ideal world, the Religious Society of Friends would open its arms to this new wave of seekers, especially as they hit the limits of denominational tolerance. But in reality, many of the East Coast meetings I’m most familiar with wouldn’t know what to do with this crowd. In Philly if you’re interested in this conversation you go to Circle of Hope (previous posts), not any of the established Quaker meetings.

Evans makes some educated guesses about the future of the “new evangelical” movement. She thinks there will be more discussion about the role of the Bible, though I would say it’s more discussion fo the various Christian interpretations of it. She also foresees a loosening of labels and denominational affiliations. I’m seeing some of this happening among Friends, though it’s almost completely on the individual level, at least here on the East Coast. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out over the next few years and whether it will bypass, engage with or siphon off the Society of Friends. In the meantime, Evans’ post and the links she embeds in it are well worth exploring.