?

How can that be?

Private Sphere:
• Family
• Relational Web
Public Sphere:
• Neighborhood
• Community
• Polity
• Organizational
• Institutional
• Commons

Importance of:
• Health
• Self/Control
• Home
– Debt, ownership, Subprime, lose value, variable mortgage, foreclosure, forced migration
• Environment
• Trust

• Psychology---what we do (behavior) not = what we think we do
• The structure of our activities
• Cognitive maps
• What assumptions underlie our activities?
• What is the basis of the structure?

Loss of Control to Experts
Loss of Control to factors in the social and physical environment
---human caused vs. natural difference
Much disabling is bellow the threshhold of our awareness
Or it is disguised as “reality”
“Everyday life”

• Technocrats and Role of Engineer
• General knowledge of education replaced by specialized knowledge
• Language of expertise---Jargon
• Role of the expert in making decisions
• “How to” replaces “should”
• Economist sets “Values”
• What is safe? What is appropriate? What is acceptable?
• Caution vs. Precaution

• Illich---Tools for Conviviality
• Conviviality vs Disabling
• Empowerment vs Disempowerment
• Control vs. Loss of Control
• Democracy vs. Empire
• Mumford---Authoritarian vs Democratic
Technics

• Where we go
(structure of our life)
• When we go
• Where transit goes and when
• Sprawl
• Cost

Picture your car/child here:
It is ours
We chose it
It reflects us
It is our consumer self revealed — what we want not what we need!!!!!!
We decorated it
It has our stuff in it
We can go where we want
We are known by our rpm not mpg

Our immediate senses are not useful in our world and we learn to ignore them
Deadened senses contribute to our not seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, moving in or smelling the roses
And the result is De-Placement and
Displacement:

Core Relationships:
Importance of Place vs. Loss of Place
• Commodification of Nature (Karl Polanyi)
• Disconnection from Nature
• Loss of Nature —Integrity of place, sacred
• Alien Built Environment
• Lack of Public and Semi-Public Spaces — disconnection from each other
• Mobility
• Virtual Realities
• Loss of Community of Place
• Loss of Subsistence

• We have built in limits to our ability to attend to stimuli
• Recent evidence suggests some other cultures have greater attend-ability
• We surround ourselves with noise
• We surround ourselves with multiple channels, all playing loud at the same time
• We have no easy way to sort out what is vital
• We have no easy way to concentrate on what is important

• Information with a vested interest
• Advertising is about misleading
• We are information rich about trivia and information poor about what counts
• We are deliberately fed wrong information
• Our trusted media are biased---Fox Syndrome
• How do we protect ourselves from distorted info?
• The danger of Systematic Distortion

• Everything is connected to everything else
• But we don’t pay attention or can’t see these connections
• We think we control our own private sphere
• We trust by default others to protect and respect our air, water, food, etc.
• Invisibility is associated with irresponsibility

“A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million
Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.”
AP probe finds drugs in drinking water
By JEFF DONN, MARTHA MENDOZA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD,
Associated Press WritersSun Mar 9, 12:33 PM ET

“A five-month-long inquiry by the AP National Investigative Team found that many communities do not test for the presence
• of drugs in drinking water, and those that do often fail to tell customers that they have found trace amounts of medications, including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. The stories also detailed the growing concerns among scientists that such pollution is adversely affecting wildlife and may be threatening human health.”
More Testing for Drugs in Water Sought
By MARTHA MENDOZA – AP.ORG 3/16/2008.

“Troubled by drugs discovered in European waters, poisons expert and biologist
Francesco Pomati set up an experiment: He exposed developing human kidney cells to a mixture of 13 drugs at levels mimicking those found in Italian rivers.
There were drugs to fight high cholesterol and blood pressure, seizures and depression, pain and infection, and cancer, all in tiny amounts.
The result: The pharmaceutical blend slowed cell growth by up to a third _ suggesting that scant amounts may exert powerful effects”
Drugs in Water Could Affect Human Cells
By JEFF DONN AP
Monday, March 10, 2008 3:45 AM EDT http://www.auburnpub.com/articles/2008/03/09/ap/regional/us/d8va1b700.txt

“Pharmaceuticals in the water are being blamed for severe reproductive problems in many types of fish:
The endangered razorback sucker and male fathead minnow have been found with lower sperm counts and damaged sperm; some walleyes and male carp have become what are called feminized fish, producing egg yolk proteins typically made only by females.
Meanwhile, female fish have developed male genital organs. Also, there are skewed sex ratios in some aquatic populations, and sexually abnormal bass that produce cells for both sperm and eggs.”
Mutated fish swimming in tainted water
Pharmaceuticals in drinking water supplies hurting surrounding wildlife
By Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard
The Associated Press March. 10, 2008

“Reports from Sweden and Norway show high levels of sucralose (Splenda) in wastewater effluent and surface waters….100 times sweeter than sugar…The presence of a sugarlike substance in the environment could change organisms' feeding behaviors, interfere with plant photosynthesis that could cause problems for algae, shutting down CO2 uptake. Sucralose also has been shown to interfere with the transport of sucrose in sugarcane… No one has systematically examined the environmental effects of sucralose.”
Artificial sweetener persists in the environment
• Science News –March 12, 2008 http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthagw/2008/mar/science/nl_sucralose.html

“The nation's waterways are brimming with excess nitrogen from fertilizer--and plans to boost biofuel production threaten to aggravate an already serious situation”
Fertilizer Runoff Overwhelms Streams and Rivers--Creating Vast
"Dead Zones"
By David Biello
Scientific American
March 14, 2008 http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fertilizer-runoff-overwhelms-streams

• We no longer rely on interpersonal relationships for our main life transactions
• We deal with corporations, not local businesses, for our mortgages, hardware, food, doctors and health insurance, banks and jobs
• Civility and reciprocity is replaced by bureaucracy and corporate interest
• We are no longer defined by who we are and who we know but by our password, if we can remember it

Risk Society --Pogo: “we have met the enemy and he is us”
• Shift from scarcity-focus to risk-focus
• Collatoral Damage of Environmental risks and Social Risks
• Render people as victims of their own society---human risk not natural risk
• Modern vs. Post-Modern Perspective

Livelihood
Reciprocity
Economics of Place
Local Self-Sufficiency allowing Subsistence
Loss of Human Scale
Loss of Relationship
Loss of Happiness and Quality

• Loss of Social Capital
• Define old as a problem
• But as boomers age, cost of problem excessive
• Define young as problem—childhood invented 150 years ago
– Hospices to hospital based, mid wives
– Bereavement counselors vs Family/Friends
– McKnight–Hidden Curriculum of service technologies:
– Authentic social forms
• Uncommodified: care vs service
• Unmanaged: consent vs control
• Uncurricularized: monopoly replace diversity

– 90/10 to 10/90 manufacturing/service
– Clienthood replaces citizenship
– Expertise and Specialization—rationalize technological systems —Trained ignorance
– Professional coding—cannot decode
– Loss of knowledge, tools and skills, antidemocratic
– Shift attention from political problems to technical problems
– Professional decides if success not you
(McKnight)

– Labeling Problems --- ill, mentally ill, fat, old, hyperactive/ADD, dying, birthing, aging, menopause, teenager, etc
– Proliferation of services—unmet needs, remedy defines need
– The economic need for need creates a demand to redefine conditions as deficiencies
– Marketing---manufacture need, translate need into deficiency, define new deficiencies new problems, these deficiencies are in the client. Professional and their tools are the answers.

Medical Nemises (Illich)
• Belief in experts override family, community,
Self
• Doctor created disease--Do we get sicker from medicine?
• More injustice from lawyers and police?
• More ignorance from teachers and schools?
• More family collapse from social workers?

Have you Applied for a New Credit Card Today?
Robber Barons---the real Johnstown Flood
Corporations
The Corporation as an Individual (1886 Supreme Court)
The Corporate – Government Relationship
--- Revolving doors, tax breaks, campaign contributions, interest mixing, capture, liability removal, hidden agendae, etc.
The Corporate – Individual Relationship
--- Livelihood becomes job, outsourcing, downsizing, debt, marketing and distruth, branding, intellectual property, information privacy, capture, ethical lapses, etc.

• The Senior Community vs “It Takes a Village to Raise a
Child”
• The gated Community vs crime, gangs, drugs, prison
• The Old Folks Home vs. Family
• Sides of the Tracks
• McKnight writes that “Communities become social deserts grown over with a scrub brush of clients and consumers.” p11
• E.F. Schumacker— The Issue of Scale
– “The guidance we need cannot be found in science or technology... but traditional wisdom of mankind.”
– Ibo story.