A small thoughtful and interesting article about Steve Jobs and his approach to vision written at the 99percent.

The movie opens with the following quote:

“In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay.  And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable.  And help to change it.”  -Ernst Fisher

I’m not usually one to link to movies of this type, all to often, they easily fall into the same traps of the rhetoric of fear and start to sound like conspiracy theories.  A good example of this is found in the views on the current economic systems portrayed.  The people interviewed give a fairly one-sided view of the system as decaying like the quote suggests, which is to be expected, I guess.  I wish though that there were at least a couple of interviews of what some economists think of the views discussed inside and about the current model and where it is headed.  If the scientific method is used to come up with solutions I would also expect it to be used to paint as unbiased an opinion as possible.  I’m too easily reminded of propaganda when selective picking of people to support your argument is done while ignoring people who oppose it.  When you want to win people over to your cause, I do believe it’s essential to understand the opposition’s arguments and counter them. In this case, there is none of that.

Secondly, even if say the movie’s observations on the current economic and social systems would prove to be objectively accurate, it feels like it falls short not necessarily in the solutions it attempts to provide but mostly in painting a believable bridge between where we are now and where we should be.  While I have nothing against applying the scientific method to solve our current unsustainability problems, I can’t help but feel it to be naive to expect that people are just going to give up everything they’ve had and believed to be important to their lives until now and adopt this new system.  It would maybe take exactly what they talk about in the movie, a catastrophic global breakdown of the economy and social fabric to get people to change that fast.  Even then, if we take the Global Financial Crisis as an example, instead of widespread change and rebuilding of the model, what we saw was the system being bailed out so that it could continue where it left off.  I remember at Uni, one of our assignments had been to create a mock project for a non-profit organisation and one of the biggest challenges that I had encountered, was not that they people did not care about most of these issues affecting the world.  They simply had no idea what simple steps they could take towards changing towards something better.  Notice the word simple here, because between debt, mortgage, family, work and social activities, rare are the people that find time to actively seek ways to make meaningful changes in their society, let alone change the world.  And all of these things are not about to just disappear because we believe they shouldn’t exist as the movie suggests.

While this may seem like me bashing the movie to bits, it’s really not.  Overall this movie moved me enough that I thought it worthwhile to sit down and write this blog post.  I admire the effort to change a system that the author believes is fundamentally flawed, I would have liked though to see the other side of the coin as it currently is too easy to dismiss it as conspiracy theory by nay-sayers.  If any of you out there have watched the movie and have some good counter-arguments or links to some useful ideas to bridge the the two systems, feel free to add to the comments at the bottom to further this discussion.

I think that everyone has, at one point or another in their lives, felt alienated from the popular crowd and/or struggled with their own sense of identity. It Get’s Better Project focuses on a very specific slice of this search for identity which is the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual) youth. I believe everyone deserves to be respected for who they are!

“I’ve always said that being a photographer really isnt about taking pictures at all for me….taking the pictures is just the vehicle that gets me in close intimate contact with people and experiences all over the world, which i crave. And the more i do meet people of all colors, ethnicities, religions, etc. on my shoots, and spend this intimate time with them, the more i realize we are all exactly the same. Same wants, needs, fears, insecurities, desires…”

This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents — “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.