We think that they are Nature’s poetry,

and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at

cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.

Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!

Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it. Dada comes from the dictionary. It is terribly simple. In French it means “hobby horse”. In German it means “good-bye”, “Get off my back”, “Be seeing you sometime”. In Romanian: “Yes, indeed, you are right, that’s it. But of course, yes, definitely, right”. And so forth.

An International word. Just a word, and the word a movement. Very easy to understand. Quite terribly simple. To make of it an artistic tendency must mean that one is anticipating complications. Dada psychology, dada Germany cum indigestion and fog paroxysm, dada literature, dada bourgeoisie, and yourselves, honoured poets, who are always writing with words but never writing the word itself, who are always writing around the actual point. Dada world war without end, dada revolution without beginning, dada, you friends and also-poets, esteemed sirs, manufacturers, and evangelists. Dada Tzara, dada Huelsenbeck, dada m’dada, dada m’dada dada mhm, dada dera dada, dada Hue, dada Tza.

How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul, dada is the pawnshop. Dada is the world’s best lily-milk soap. Dada Mr Rubiner, dada Mr Korrodi. Dada Mr Anastasius Lilienstein. In plain language: the hospitality of the Swiss is something to be profoundly appreciated. And in questions of aesthetics the key is quality.

I shall be reading poems that are meant to dispense with conventional language, no less, and to have done with it. Dada Johann Fuchsgang Goethe. Dada Stendhal. Dada Dalai Lama, Buddha, Bible, and Nietzsche. Dada m’dada. Dada mhm dada da. It’s a question of connections, and of loosening them up a bit to start with. I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. Mr Schulz’s words are only two and a half centimetres long.

It will serve to show how articulated language comes into being. I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows . . . Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn’t let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers’ hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins. Dada is the heart of words.

Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance.

Luther Blissett is both the story-teller and the Mac Guffin of a board-game played on the stage of the world. It is essentially a grim theory of conspiracy which mostly makes use of techniques tested in the Mail Art (Ethe)real Network (MULTIPLE NAMES, ‘Add, Pass & Return’ creations etc.) in order to manipulate and overturn the language of myths, the archetypes of the popular culture as well as the neo-pagan religious experience. It is a sort of lucid shamanism which does not belong to a pre-democratic and pre-individual view of the world (i.e. a claim to a totalitarian social unity); on the contrary it puts itself BEYOND democracy and the individuality, in the name of a free chaotic empathy between the creatures, as if we were charming Betazoids.

Sometimes the links between the elements of the project happen to recall the most entangled detective stories (e.g. “The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler or “White Jazz” by James Ellroy), or maybe ‘Paco Ignacio Taibo meets Paracelsus at an Illegal Rave’.

The game consists in forcing the Wo/Mankind to deal with the Catastrophe and lie down next to it, so that we can’t be caught while we sleep. When one feels up to being in safety, at worst her/his mind will PLAY WITH the Catastrophe as an improbable contingency, and some modest assurance will be enough to give her/him shelter. But we are NOT in safety: as a whole, the present-day social relations are nothing but an infectious neuro-epidemic, so we must PLAY INTO the Catastrophe and tie our symbolic capital up to it, in order to keep the Northwest Passage open. The Multiple Name becomes a borderline experience, a live broadcast from the last promontory of the centuries: “At the beginning of a century you may act the experimentalist, but the end is like a western, one makes it a point of duty to describe what’s happening and sum it up…” (Andrea G. Pinketts).

Luther Blissett is not a ‘teamwork identity’ as reported by the journalists; rather, it is a MULTIPLE SINGLE: the ‘Luther Blissetts’ don’t exist, only Luther Blissett exist. Today we can infuse ourselves with vitality by exploring any possibility of escaping the conventional identities.

LUTHER BLISSETT. NOTES ON THE NATURE OF THE CONSPIRACY

There is nothing new when someone affirms that the nihilistic tyranny of the spectacle could be faced and fought by “talking big and telling tall stories”, i.e. by raising a whirl of fibs and lies “till a communication short-circuit dissipates the virtual world and the real one will settle again” (Paul Virilio). In fact, a radical criticism of the world order, and even the right to criticize, was an achievement by the “plagiarist” pirates of the past centuries, i.e. by rascals, buffoons and court jesters. The Middle Age social conflict was similar to that of the present day: the language of the powers that be (that is the language as Law, State and Identity) was objected, perverted and subverted by the words of the détournement, by parody and the plagiarism, by a ‘resistance through lies’ which used to keep the language in motion as well as to frustrate all authoritarian codification. Tramps, tumblers and criminals deviated from the “straight path” of the high poem of chivalry in order to practise such minor literary genres as satire, coarse songs and blasphemous prayers. So they saved the linguistic cross-fertilisation. Thanks to them, the speaking of each class, rank or profession might cross and modify one another. The XVIth century novel “Gargantua et Pantagruel” by François Rabelais owed to this practice of the “merry prank” its radicalism and its subversive change which consists in “breaking all hierarchical false link between ideals and things by destroying any ideological partition between them” (M. Bakhtin). In plain words, it was necessary to free anything and let them naturally link up each other, however strange this might seem considering Tradition and the customary connections. It was necessary to enable things to come into contact one another with all their concreteness and variety, in order to reapproach what had been fallaciously divided and redivide what had been fallaciously approached. It was a question of “a radical skepticism about the direct speaking and its seriousness, a skepticism which went so far as to negate any possibility that a direct speaking couldn’t be false” (M. Bakhtin). Rabelais, Villon and their anonymous predecessors did not put their feet down trying to state Truth in a world of lies: quite the contrary they used to “circumvent” any official truth and dismember it from the inside by carrying its logic to paradox. Today, on the analogy, it’s question of preventing the writing of an informal constitution which submits the general intellect to a system based on exploitation and the ecocide. The struggle is still against the language of the powers that be, in order to create by merry pranks new links between things (i.e. networking) and break any old hierarchy. As Rabelais emphasized in his works that the Middle Age was over and that new social relations were beating up the inertial force of the feudal world, so we have to point out that wagework has become unnecessary, that information and technology must belong to everybody, and so on. However, it is insufficient to wait for a ‘short-circuit’ or to hope for cathartic explosions: rather, we must create a scientific strategy of the merry prank. In the mid-eighties cyberpunk propagated an interesting metaphor, according to which information is a bank that we have to force open in the name of a free admittance to the data, challenging their secrecy. That was correct, yet the 1989 Amsterdam ICATA (an international conference on the alternative use of technology) had also stated that “any information is in the meantime deformation, the right of the former is inseparable from that of the latter, which belongs to the whole world…We should subvert the conventional channels by means of detournements and surrealistic changes of the events in order to raise chaos, rumours and waste which in their turn shall be regarded as carriers of information”. This provocative use of the term ‘right’ had to cause a breakdown in the liberal phraseology, as though we used the term ‘non-statal public sphere’. Actually, those who decided to follow that statement opened breaches in the liberal-democratic horizon which had limited any discussion on ‘infoglasnost’ and the cybermedia up to that time. Those XXIth century rascals and buffoons weren’t interested in the myth of a “new new frontier”: rather, they decided to deal with rumours, noises and interferences, just standing in the dark shades which the information outgrowth couldn’t help throwing on the capitalist society, i.e. the symptoms of a psychochemical illness. The morals of those who ride the waves of the digital ocean are necessarily provisional. Especially in Italy, some called all this ‘Transmaniacality’ (see the 1979 John Shirley S-F novel “Transmaniacon”). In the depths of the informal ‘network of events’ which these teams of mind invaders are setting up, one of the most interesting practices of merry prank is the so-called MULTIPLE NAME, a technique particularly improved by the NEOISTS. KAREN ELIOT was an important multiple name. The Luther Blissett Project has been launched in the Summer ’94 by an international gang of revolutionaries, mail artists, poets, performers, underground ‘zines, cybernauts and squatters. A multiple name, if it was used outside small circles of radicals, would be a practical solution of problems such as the relation between community and individual, or the quest for identity. All the debates on the necessity of a ‘Nomadology’ and all idle talk on ‘situations’ are superseded by this concept. Luther Blissett is a -dividual, because the character has many personalities and reputations; Luther Blissett is also a con-dividual, because many individuals share the name; Luther Blissett is a multitude as well as a ‘decentralized subject’, a project aiming to what Karl Marx called ‘Gemeinwesen’ (i.e. the common essence of the Wo/Mankind, the awareness of the global community). Luther Blissett is not an (anti)artist like KAREN ELIOT: s/he’s a cultural terrorist who supports the religious programme of the NEOIST ALLIANCE. Sabotages, hoaxes, urban legends, performances, magazines, bulletin boards and TV or radio broadcasts are spreading the name all over the world. Especially in Italy, this merry prank is reaching new heights of subversion and mythopoiesis. Anyone can be Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name. Become Luther Blissett.

–Hakim Bey

Mangue, o conceito
Estuário. Parte terminal de rio ou lagoa. Porção de rio com água salobra. Em suas margens se encontram os manguezais, comunidades de plantas tropicais ou subtropicais inundadas pelos movimentos das marés. Pela troca de matéria orgânica entre a água doce e a água salgada, os mangues estão entre os ecossistemas mais produtivos do mundo.
Estima-se que duas mil espécies de microorganismos e animais vertebrados e invertebrados estejam associados à vegetação do mangue. Os estuários fornecem áreas de desova e criação para dois terços da produção anual de pescados do mundo inteiro. Pelo menos oitenta espécies comercialmente importantes dependem do alagadiço costeiro.
Não é por acaso que os mangues são considerados um elo básico da cadeia alimentar marinha. Apesar das muriçocas, mosquitos e mutucas, inimigos das donas-de-casa, para os cientistas são tidos como símbolos de fertilidade, diversidade e riqueza.
Manguetown, a cidade
A planície costeira onde a cidade do Recife foi fundada é cortada por seis rios. Após a expulsão dos holandeses, no século XVII, a (ex)cidade *maurícia* passou desordenadamente às custas do aterramento indiscriminado e da destruição de seus manguezais.
Em contrapartida, o desvairio irresistível de uma cínica noção de *progresso*, que elevou a cidade ao posto de *metrópole* do Nordeste, não tardou a revelar sua fragilidade.
Bastaram pequenas mudanças nos ventos da história, para que os primeiros sinais de esclerose econômica se manifestassem, no início dos anos setenta. Nos últimos trinta anos, a síndrome da estagnação, aliada a permanência do mito da *metrópole* só tem levado ao agravamento acelerado do quadro de miséria e caos urbano.
Mangue, a cena
Emergência! Um choque rápido ou o Recife morre de infarto! Não é preciso ser médico para saber que a maneira mais simples de parar o coração de um sujeito é obstruindo as suas veias. O modo mais rápido, também, de infartar e esvaziar a alma de uma cidade como o Recife é matar os seus rios e aterrar os seus estuários. O que fazer para não afundar na depressão crônica que paralisa os cidadãos? Como devolver o ânimo, deslobotomizar e recarregar as baterias da cidade? Simples! Basta injetar um pouco de energia na lama e estimular o que ainda resta de fertilidade nas veias do Recife.
Em meados de 91, começou a ser gerado e articulado em vários pontos da cidade um núcleo de pesquisa e produção de idéias pop. O objetivo era engendrar um *circuito energético*, capaz de conectar as boas vibrações dos mangues com a rede mundial de circulação de conceitos pop. Imagem símbolo: uma antena parabólica enfiada na lama.
Hoje, Os mangueboys e manguegirls são indivíduos interessados em hip-hop, colapso da modernidade, Caos, ataques de predadores marítimos (principalmente tubarões), moda, Jackson do Pandeiro, Josué de Castro, rádio, sexo não-virtual, sabotagem, música de rua, conflitos étnicos, midiotia, Malcom Maclaren, Os Simpsons e todos os avanços da química aplicados no terreno da alteração e expansão da consciência.
Bastaram poucos anos para os produtos da fábrica mangue invadirem o Recife e começarem a se espalhar pelos quatro cantos do mundo. A descarga inicial de energia gerou uma cena musical com mais de cem bandas. No rastro dela, surgiram programas de rádio, desfiles de moda, vídeo clipes, filmes e muito mais. Pouco a pouco, as artérias vão sendo desbloqueadas e o sangue volta a circular pelas veias da Manguetown.

Ferrez

A capoeira não vem mais, agora reagimos com a palavra, porque pouca coisa mudou, principalmente para nós.
Não somos movimento, não somos os novos, não somos nada, nem pobres, porque pobre segundo os poetas da rua, é quem não tem as coisas.
Cala a boca, negro e pobre aqui não tem vez! Cala a boca!
Cala a boca uma porra, agora agente fala, agora agente canta, e na moral agora agente escreve.
Quem inventou o barato não separou entre literatura boa/feita com caneta de ouro e literatura ruim/escrita com carvão, a regra é só uma, mostrar as caras. Não somos o retrato, pelo contrário, mudamos o foco e tiramos nós mesmos a nossa foto.
A própria linguagem margeando e não os da margem, marginalizando e não us marginalizados, rocha na areia do capitalismo.
O sonho não é seguir o padrão, Não é ser o empregado que virou o patrão, não isso não, aqui ninguém quer humilhar, pagar migalhas nem pensar, nós sabemos a dor por recebe-las.
Somos o contra sua opinião, não viveremos ou morreremos se não tivermos o selo da aceitação, na verdade tudo vai continuar, muitos querendo ou não.
Um dia a chama capitalista fez mal a nossos avós, agora faz mal a nossos pais e no futuro vai fazer a nossos filhos, o ideal é mudar a fita, quebrar o ciclo da mentira dos “direitos iguais”, da farsa dos “todos são livres” agente sabe que não é assim, vivemos isso nas ruas, sob os olhares dos novos capitães do mato, policiais que são pagos para nos lembrar que somos classificados por três letras classes: C,D,E.
Literatura de rua com sentido sim, com um principio sim, e com um ideal sim, trazer melhoras para o povo que constrói esse pais mas não recebe sua parte.
O jogo é objetivo, compre, ostente, e tenha minutos de felicidade, seja igual ao melhor, use o que ele usa.
Mas nós não precisamos disso, isso traz morte, dor, cadeia, mães sem filhos, lágrimas demais no rio de sangue da periferia.
Somos mais, somos aquele que faz a cultura, falem que não somos marginais, nos tirem o pouco que sobrou, até o nome, já não escolhemos o sobrenome, deixamos para os donos da casa grande escolher por nós, deixamos eles marcarem nossas peles, porque teríamos espaço para um movimento literário? Sabe duma coisa, o mais louco é que não precisamos de sua legitimação, porque não batemos na porta para alguém abrir, nós arrombamos a porta e entramos.
Sua negação não é novidade, você não entendeu? Não é o quanto vendemos, é o que falamos, não é por onde nem como publicamos, é que sobrevivemos.
Estamos na rua loco, estamos na favela, no campo, no bar, nos viadutos, e somos marginais mas antes somos literatura, e isso vocês podem negar, podem fechar os olhos, virarem as costas, mas como já disse, continuaremos aqui, assim como o muro social invisível que divide esse pais.
O significado do que colocamos em suas mãos hoje, é nada mais do que a realização de um sonho que infelizmente não foi visto por centenas de escritores marginalizados desse país.
Ao contrário do bandeirante que avançou com as mãos sujas de sangue nosso território, e arrancou a fé verdadeira, doutrinando nossos antepassados índios, ao contrário dos senhores das casas grandes que escravizaram nossos irmãos africanos e tentaram dominar e apagar toda a cultura de um povo massacrado mas não derrotado.
Uma coisa é certa, queimaram nossos documentos, mentiram sobre nossa história, mataram nossos antepassados.
Outra coisa também é certa, mentirão no futuro, esconderão e queimarão tudo que prove que um dia a classe menos beneficiada com o dinheiro fez arte.
Jogando contra a massificação que domina e aliena cada vez mais os assim chamados por eles de “excluídos sociais” e para nos certificar que o povo da periferia/favela/gueto tenha sua colocação na história, e que não fique mais 500 anos jogado no limbo cultural de um país que tem nojo de sua própria cultura, a literatura marginal se faz presente para representar a cultura de um povo, composto de minorias, mas em seu todo uma maioria.
E temos muito a proteger e a mostrar, temos nosso próprio vocabulário que é muito precioso, principalmente num país colonizado até os dias de hoje, onde a maioria não tem representatividade cultural e social, na real negô o povo num tem nem o básico pra comer, e mesmo assim meu tio, agente faz por onde ter us barato para agüentar mais um dia.
Mas estamos na área, e já somos vários, estamos lutando pelo espaço para que no futuro, os autores do gueto sejam também lembrados e eternizados, mostramos a várias faces da caneta que se faz presente na favela, e pra representar o grito do verdadeiro povo brasileiro, nada mais que os autenticos, e como a pergunta do menino numa certa palestra.
- como é essa literatura marginal publicada em livros.
Ela é honrada, ela é autentica e nem por morarmos perto do lixo, fazemos parte dele, merecemos o melhor, pois já sofremos demais.
O mimiógrafo foi útil, mas a guerra é maior agora, os grandes meios de comunicação estão ai, com mais de 50% de anunciantes por edição, bancando a ilusão que você terá que ter em sua mente.
A maior satisfação está em agredir os inimigos novamente, e em trazer o sorriso na boca da Dona Maria quando ver o livro que o filho trouxe para casa.
Vindo com muita mais gente e com grande prazer de apresentar novos talentos da escrita periférica.
Prus aliados o banquete está servido, pode degustar, porque esse tipo de literatura viveu muito na rua e por fim está aqui no livro.
Depois do lançamento dos três atos que fizemos juntamente com a revista Caros Amigos, edições especiais chamadas Caros amigos/literatura marginal ao qual a Casa Amarela desde o principio acreditou e apoiou, a forma agora chega em livro.
Mas como sempre todos falam tudo e não dizem nada, vamos dar uma explicada: A revista é feita para e por pessoas que foram postas a margem da sociedade.
Ganhamos até prêmios, como o da A.P.C.A.(Academia Paulista de Críticos de Arte) melhor projeto especial do ano.
Muitas são as perguntas, e pouco o espaço para respostas, um exemplo para se guardar é o de Kafka, a crítica convencionou que aquela era uma literatura menor. Ou seja, literatura feita pela minoria dos judeus em Praga, numa língua maior o Alemão.
A Literatura Marginal sempre é bom frisar é uma literatura feita por minorias, sejam elas raciais ou sócio-econômicas. Literatura feita a margem dos núcleos centrais do saber e da grande cultura nacional, ou seja os de grande poder aquisitivo. Mas alguns dizem que sua principal característica é a linguagem, é o jeito que falamos, que contamos a história, bom isso fica para os estudiosos, o que agente faz é tentar explicar, mas agente fica na tentativa, pois aqui não reina nem o começo da verdade absoluta.
Hoje não somos uma literatura menor, nem nos deixemos taxar assim, somos uma literatura maior, feita por maiorias, numa linguagem maior, pois temos as raízes e as mantemos.
Não vou apresentar os convidados um a um porque eles falarão por sim mesmos, é ler e verificar, só sei que com muitos deles eu tenho lindas histórias, várias caminhadas tentando fazer uma única coisa, o povo ler.
Cansei de ouvir.
- mas o que cês tão fazendo é separar a literatura, a do gueto e a do centro.
E nunca cansarei de responder.
- o barato já tá separado a muito tempo, só que do lado de cá ninguém deu um gritão, ninguém chegou com a nossa parte, foi feito todo um mundo de teses e de estudos do lado de lá, e do cá mal terminamos o ensino dito básico.
Sabe o que é mais louco, nesse pais você tem que sofrer boicote de tudo que é lado, mas nunca pode fazer o seu, o seu é errado, por mais que você tenha sofrido você tem que fazer por todos, principalmente pela classe que quase conseguiu te matar, fazendo você nascer na favela e te dando a miséria como herança.
Afinal um dia o povo ia ter que se valorizar, então é nóis nas linhas da cultura, chegando de vagar, sem querer agredir ninguém, mas também não aceitando desaforo nem compactuando com hipocrisia alheia, bom vamos deixar de ladainha e na bola de meia tocar o barco.
Boa leitura, e muita paz se você merece-la, se não bem vindo a guerra.

Agradecimentos a:
Sérgio de Souza
Marina Amaral
Wagner Nabuco
Guilheme Azevedo,
Garrett,
R.O.D.
Bolha.
E a todos os parceiros que tem acompanhado o L.M. e o Movimento 1DASUL, tamos de pé graças a vocês.

Ferréz

E como já é de praxe, aqui vai um recado pro sistema.

“ Evitem certos tipos, certos ambientes. Evitem a fala do povo, que vocês nem sabem onde mora e como. Não reportem povo, que ele fede. Não contem ruas, vidas, paixões violentas. Não se metam com o restolho que vocês não vêem humanidade ali. Que vocês não percebem vida ali. E vocês não sabem escrever essas coisas. Não podem sentir certas emoções, como o ouvido humano não percebe ultra-sons.”

João Antônio, trecho do livro Abraçado ao meu rancor.

Obama is stimulating. Davos is deliberating. C-levels areeliminating. Wall St is recriminating. Welcome to the macropocalypse: no one, it seems, can put the global economy back together again.

It’s time to reboot capitalism. So where do we begin?

Here’s a suggestion for what should be at the top of agenda of every decision-maker across the economy, from Davos, to Obama, to Sand Hill Road, to the revolutionaries in tiny garages hatching tomorrow’s Googles: reconceiving growth.

Why?

20th century capitalism is eating itself. For the first time since World War II, global growth is forecast to turn negative — and that’s an optimistic forecast, relative to the possibility of a global lost decade.Today’s leaders are plugging dikes, bailing out industries and banks as they fail. Yet, what negative global growth suggests is that the problem is of a different order: that we have reached the boundaries of a kindof growth.

Reigniting growth requires rethinking growth. The question Davos — and most leaders — are asking is: where will tomorrow’s growth come from? Will it result from oil, cleantech, bailouts, China, or Obama? The answer is: none of the above. Tomorrow’s growth won’t come from a person, place, or technology – but from understanding why yesterday’sgrowth has failed. The same growth models applied to new people, places, and technologies will simply result in the same crises, over and over again. We have to reboot growth: the problem is not what is growing versus what is not, but howwe grow.

20th century growth was dumb. The central, defining lesson of the macropocalypse is that 20th century growth wasn’t built to last. Dumb growth is unsustainable – if the world grows the same way that developed countries did, well, there won’t be a world. Dumb growth is unfair: it’s growth that’s an illusion for many; just ask the American middle class. And, ultimately, perhaps most dangerously, dumb growth is brittle: it falls too easily into collapse, reversing many of yesterday’s gains; just ask Iceland.

21st century economies will be powered by smart growth. Not all growth is created equal. Some kinds of growth are more valuable than others. Where dumb growth is unsustainable, unfair, and brittle, smart growth is sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

Here are the four pillars of smart growth – for economies, communities, and corporations:

1. Outcomes, not income. Dumb growth is about incomes – are we richer today than we were yesterday? Smart growth is about people, and how much better or worse off they are – not merely how much junk an economy can churn out. Smart growth measures people’s outcomes – not just their incomes. Are people healthier, fitter, smarter, happier? Economics that measure financial numbers, we’ve learned the hard way, often fail to be meaningful, except to the quants among us. It is tangible human outcomes that are the arbiters of authentic value creation.

2. Connections, not transactions. Dumb growth looks at what’s flowing through the pipes of the global economy: the volume of trade. Smart growth looks at how pipes are formed, and why some pipes matter more than others: the quality of connections. It doesn’t just look at transactions at the global, regional, or national level — how much world trade has grown, for example — but looks at how local and global relationships power invention and innovation. Without Silicon Valley’s relationships powering the development of personal computing and the internet, for example, the volume of trade between Taiwan, Japan, and China, would be a fraction of what it is. Smart growth seeks to amplify connection and community — because the goal isn’t just to trade, but to co-create and collaborate.

3. People, not product. The next time you hear an old dude talking about “product”, let him know the 20th century ended a decade ago. Smart growth isn’t driven by pushing product, but by the skill, dedication, and creativity of people. What’s the difference? Everything. Globalization driven by McJobs deskilling the world, versus globalization driven by entrepreneurship, venture economies, and radical innovation. People not product means a renewed focus on labour mobility, human capital investment, labour market standards, and labour market efficiency. Smart growth isn’t powered by capital dully seeking the lowest-cost labour — but by giving labour the power to seek the capital with they can create, invent, and innovate the most.

4. Creativity, not productivity. Uh-oh: Creativity is an economic four-letter word. Why? Because it’s hard to measure, manage, and model. So economists focus on productivity instead — and the result is dumb growth. Smart growth focuses on economic creativity – because creativity is what let us know that competition is creating new value, instead of just shifting old value around. What is economic creativity? How many new industries, markets, categories, and segments an economy can consistently create. Think China’s gonna save the world? Think again: it’s economically productive, but it’s far from economically creative. Smart growth is creative — not merely productive.

Here’s a final point — and a question.

Smart economies are driven by smart growth. The four pillars of smart growth are design principles for next-generation economies. 20th century economies are limited to unsustainable, unfair, brittle, dumb growth. Smart growth is more sustainable, equitable, and resilient.

Capitalism 2.0 cannot be powered by growth.1.0: that’s why the race for smart growth is inevitable. The economic pressure — the potential for value creation, in a world being ripped apart by value destruction — is simply too great.

Can you build a business powered by smart growth? The four pillars of smart growth aren’t just design principles for next-generation economies: they’re also design principles for next-generation businesses. Already, tomorrow’s radical innovators don’t accept yesterday’s toxic, tired consensus. Revolutionaries like Apple, Threadless, Etsy, Whole Foods, American Apparel, and Google are already reinventing better ways to grow – from the grass-roots up.

Yesterday’s incumbents are beginning to fail en masse, while these revolutionaries remain resilient. Why? As our research at the Lab suggests, getting smart is a better choice than staying dumb: smart growth results in more creativity, innovation, effectiveness, and power than dumb growth.

For now, fire away in the comments with questions, examples, or criticisms. Which other companies are seeking smart growth? Is your organization building any of the pillars of smart growth? Are there countries or cities that are pockets of smart growth?

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2009/01/davos_discussing_a_depression.html

Over the past few months I’ve been talking with many people passionate about Information Visualization who share a sense of saturation over a growing number of frivolous projects. The criticism is slightly different from person to person, but it usually goes along these lines: “It’s just visualization for the sake of visualization”, “It’s just eye-candy”, “They all look the same”.

When Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas wrote about Vernacular Visualization, in their excellent article on the July-August 2008 edition of interactions magazine, they observed how the last couple of years have witnessed the tipping point of a field that used to be locked away in its academic vault, far from the public eye. The recent outburst of interest for Information Visualization caused a huge number of people to join in, particularly from the design and art community, which in turn lead to many new projects and a sprout of fresh innovation. But with more agents in a system you also have a stronger propensity for things to go wrong.

I don’t tend to be harshly censorial of many of the projects that over-glorify aesthetics over functionality, because I believe they’re part of our continuous growth and maturity as a discipline. They also represent important steps in this long progression for discovery, where we are still trying to understand how we can find new things with the rising amounts of data at our disposal. However, I do feel it’s important to reemphasize the goals of Information Visualization, and at this stage make a clear departure from other parallel, yet distinct practices.

When talking to Stuart Eccles from Made by Many, after one of my lectures in August 2009, the idea of writing a manifesto came up and I quickly decided to write down a list of considerations or requirements, that rapidly took the shape of an Information Visualization Manifesto. Some will consider this insightful and try to follow these principles in their work. Others will still want to pursue their own flamboyant experiments and not abide to any of this. But in case the last option is chosen, the resulting outcome should start being categorized in a different way. And there are many designations that can easily encompass those projects, such as New Media Art, Computer Art, Algorithmic Art, or my favorite and recommended term: Information Art.

Even though a clear divide is necessary, it doesn’t mean that Information Visualization and Information Art cannot coexist. I would even argue they should, since they can learn a lot from each other and cross-pollinate ideas, methods and techniques. In most cases the same dataset can originate two parallel projects, respectively in Information Visualization and Information Art. However, it’s important to bear in mind that the context, audience and goals of each resulting project are intrinsically distinct.

In order for the aspirations of Information Visualization to prevail, here are my 10 directions for any project in this realm:

Form Follows Function

Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualization, Form follows Revelation. Take the simplest analogy of a wooden chair. Data represents all the different wooden components (seat, back, legs) that are then assembled according to an ultimate goal: to seat in the case of the chair, or to reveal and disclose in the case of Visualization. Form in both cases arises from the conjunction of the different building blocks, but it never conforms to them. It is only from the problem domain that we can ascertain if a layout may be better suited and easier to understand than others. Independently of the subject, the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight.

Start with a Question

“He who is ashamed of asking is afraid of learning”, says a famous Danish proverb. A great quality to anyone doing work in the realm of Information Visualization is to be curious and inquisitive. Every project should start with a question. An inquiry that leads you to discover further insights on the system, and in the process answer questions that weren’t even there in the beginning. This investigation might arise from a personal quest or the specific needs of a client or audience, but you should always have a defined query to drive your work.

Interactivity is Key

As defined by Ben Shneiderman, Stuart K. Card and Jock D. Mackinlay, “Information Visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition”. This well-known statement highlights how interactivity is an integral part of the field’s DNA. Any Information Visualization project should not only facilitate understanding but also the analysis of the data, according to specific use cases and defined goals. By employing interactive techniques, users are able to properly investigate and reshape the layout in order to find appropriate answers to their questions. This capability becomes imperative as the degree of complexity of the portrayed system increases. Visualization should be recognized as a discovery tool.

Cite your Source

Information Visualization, as any other means of conveying information, has the power to lie, to omit, and to be deliberately biased. To avoid any misconception you should always cite your source. If your raw material is a public dataset, the results of a scientific study, or even your own personal data, you should always disclose where it came from, provide a link to it, and if possible, clarify what was used and how it was extracted. By doing so you allow people to review the original source and properly validate its authenticity. It will also bring credibility and integrity to your work. This principle has long been advocated by Edward Tufte and should be widely applied to any project that visually conveys external data.

The power of Narrative

Human beings love stories and storytelling is one of the most successful and powerful ways to learn, discover and disseminate information. Your project should be able to convey a message and easily encapsulate a compelling narrative.

Do not glorify Aesthetics

Aesthetics are an important quality to many Information Visualization projects and a critical enticement at first sight, but it should always be seen as a consequence and never its ultimate goal.

Look for Relevancy

Extracting relevancy in a set of data is one of the hardest pursuits for any machine. This is where natural human abilities such as pattern recognition and parallel processing come in hand. Relevancy is also highly dependent on the final user and the context of interaction. If the relevancy ratio is high it can increase the possibility of comprehension, assimilation and decision-making.

Embrace Time

Time is one of the hardest variables to map in any system. It’s also one of the richest. If we consider a social network, we can quickly realize that a snapshot in time would only tell us a bit of information about the community. On the other hand, if time had been properly measured and mapped, it would provide us with a much richer understanding of the changing dynamics of that social group. We should always consider time when our targeted system is affected by its progression.

Aspire for Knowledge

A core ability of Information Visualization is to translate information into knowledge. It’s also to facilitate understanding and aid cognition. Every project should aim at making the system more intelligible and transparent, or find an explicit new insight or pattern within it. It should always provide a polished gem of knowledge. As Jacques Bertin eloquently stated on his Sémiologie Graphique, first published in 1967, “it is the singular characteristic of a good graphic transcription that it alone permits us to evaluate fully the quality of the content of the information”.

Avoid gratuitous visualizations

“Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain”. This is how physicist Hans Christian von Baeyer starts his book Information: The New Language of Science. To the growing amounts of publicly available data, Information Visualization needs to respond as a cognitive filter, an empowered lens of insight, and should never add more noise to the flow. Don’t assume any visualization is a positive step forward. In the context of Information Visualization, simply conveying data in a visual form, without shedding light on the portrayed subject, or even worst, making it more complex, can only be considered a failure.

Source: VC Blog