What Judy and I have just unwittingly demonstrated are the consequences of actions as we have been culturally conditioned to enact. Judy was never at any fault here, and in my view ought not to be chagrined, because she is the host of a 'parasitism' created by the people who initiated the original email, playing upon our strategies for self-benefit, as are also their strategies, as WE have been deeply enculturated to exercise in this society. As Harding points out, it is our cultural destiny to deplete the commons. Yet... and yet, here we are, and the Internet is still functioning just fine.
I, in turn, reacted, without due deliberation of the consequences for Judy, and for that I wish to repeat my apologies and thanks to Judy centerstage. In hind sight, I could have realized there could have been another time, another context, into which the topic of the Internet as the commons could have been raised. Yet, with a deep commitment of my own for fostering a greater ecological understanding of shared renewable resources, and under conditions of zeitnot, my own hasty actions have not preserved one of our most important shared resources -- Judy as a person and the mind-trust that she materializes in constitution with the rest of us. There is far more to mind-as-distributed than cognition-without-affect, and I think both Judy and I not only have shared that belief in the past, I hope we have enacted its importance today.
"[They] will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within [them]; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in [their] favor in a more liberal sense, and [they] will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as [they simplify their lives], the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. " --- Thoreau
Bill Barowy, Associate Professor
Lesley College, 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790
Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169
http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html
_______________________
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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