Why We Should All Advocate for Wokeness

Awareness of unfairness in the treatment of others -- the definition of the slang term "woke" -- not only makes the world a better place, it makes all of us better people. By being aware of systemic racism and bigotry, we could build a culture in which the marginalized receive empathy instead of disdain.

Being “woke” is, according to Merriam-Webster, “aware and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

Originally slang used by Black Americans, the word became part of the national lexicon in the past few years. But its meaning has already changed, and there is a divide in how the word is perceived, a divide that is both political and generational.

We should reflect on Nietzsche's admonishment: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Power theory teaches us that every system develops a subsystem that initially makes rules that are good for the system, but, eventually, that governing subsystem makes rules that are good for itself. George Orwell ended Animal Farm with the disgusting image of pigs imitating their human oppressors.

We can become more "woke" without becoming authoritative. The impulse for humans to mistreat each other is deeply rooted in our history.

The analogy between mistreatment of others and mistreatment of ourselves also applies to Christians and Jews. Many Christians, historically, knew it was wrong to persecute Christians because of their religion, but they missed the analogy to mistreating Jews because of their religion, not because they believed the Old Testament had been replaced or because they blamed Jews for the Crucifixion, but because the “righteous indignation” that Christianity offers in the story of the Crucifixion depends on missing the analogy.

Hate cannot stand up to analogized, contextualized empathy, which is why Critical Race Theorists organized their scholarship around storytelling. Hate requires the obliteration of context. This is well-known to trial lawyers. When juries decide whether to impose the death penalty, defense attorneys present evidence concerning their clients’ difficult childhoods. 

What we see happening with the term “woke” is similar to what happened to the term “political correctness,” from the 1980s and in the 90s by the left. The term was always a bit tongue in cheek, but it was serious in that people wanted to respect diversity, to respect the political differences that exist. However, as soon as people who did not share that ideology started using it, it became pejorative.

Critical Race Theory and antiracism focus on changing formal and informal policy rather than on aiming to identify who not to hate. 

Read more here...

Implementing DevOps could save your organization big money...

A primary purpose of DevOps is to release software builds at better quality with higher frequency. Automation in DevOps should be embraced to realize this objective, without introducing a negative effect into the quality or frequency of software released to end-users. Based on an analysis conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of GitLab, the report concludes organizations can save as much as $3.7 million by reducing the number of DevOps tools they need to acquire by a factor of four.

The report also claims organizations can also see a 12x increase in the number of revenue-generating application releases in a year, resulting in $12.3 million in additional revenue, while at the same time reducing code defects to generate more than $16.8 million in savings. Overall, the report says there is a 407% return on investment (ROI) in the GitLab platform.

As a global economic downturn brought on by the pandemic unfolds, many organizations are focusing on costs. Being able to accelerate the rate of application development -- and deployment -- should be part of digital business transformation initiatives. The more business processes become automated, the less expensive to maintain. This is obvious giving the more dependent organizations are becoming on software. But many leaders are navigating ways to reduce costs without forcing every member of the team to standardize.

How the Web-Based Platform Disintermediates Trade of Ideas and Knowledge

Here at Bluedog, we believe in fostering marketplaces that are a decentralized means of transferring individual ownership (the quid-pro-quo exchanges of goods and services). Unfortunately the concentrations of ownership that exist right now are not the natural tendency of the capitalist market form, but to some extent the result of government privileges and prohibitions that deform markets — including privileges to landlords, bankers, factory owners, etc. (think bail-outs, corporate welfare, government-granted monopolies). Sometimes we see suppression of grassroots or horizontal forms of economic organization (governments mandating people to buy into a corporate insurance market, shutting down free clinics and mutual aid societies, busting unions through Taft-Hartley and “Right-to-Work,” etc.).

The e-marketplace that Bluedog participates in is business-to-business oriented, in which buyers and sellers exchange services and information. This consortia helps the individual business operate more efficiently (by connecting geographically dispersed teams), and groups of businesses help each other, by enabling the free exchange of useful content, connections to experts, and assessment of business opportunities with an eye towards teaming.

With many of today’s social-based economies, we see the opportunity to decentralize, from the bottom up. With Uber, AirBnB and others, there’s a platform-based environment to connect suppliers (people with cars or empty flats) with buyers (travelers). This is facilitated via the internet, where technology has enabled a cooperative model. Perhaps soon we will see more co-ops, worker-owned businesses and individuals trying out new experiments in trading with each other for the things or services people need or want.

What does this model mean for businesses? Easier access to talented individuals, called up upon demand, but free to go about their lives without being chained to a location, or stuck in a traffic jamb getting there. Better allocation of financial resources will enable smaller firms to compete with bigger ones. Perhaps technologies such as 3d printing will make micro-manufacturing feasible — such as automobiles or we will be able to deconstruct medical services such that costs are dramatically lowered?

The single-point-of-access through a web browser provides a compelling model, where information inside an organization, or across organizational boundaries, facilitates connectivity via an electronic intermediary. A secondary value is the aggregation of information, avoiding the limitations of direct interaction by lowering search costs, the lack of privacy, and other risks. Add mobile computing to this, where iPhones and iPads foster real-time access to information and tools anywhere there’s a wireless connection, and you’ve got fertile ground for innovation.

East vs west, individualism vs collectivism

Cited from a recented New York Times article by T. M. Luhrmann -- some cultures are more individualistic, and others more interdependent. Agriculture may explain why. Some interesting -- if broadly reached -- conclusions based on an anthropologic view. I'm unsure there's sufficient evidence to support ALL the conclusions the author of this NYT article jumps to, but certainly the idea that individual-achievement vs the-collective-good is a worthy thought problem.

Why Are Some Cultures More Individualistic Than Others?

AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertzobserved, this is a peculiar idea.

People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.

These are broad brush strokes, but the research demonstrating the differences is remarkably robust and it shows that they have far-reaching consequences. The social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues found that these different orientations toward independence and interdependence affected cognitive processing. For example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish and seaweed fronds, and the Americans will remember the single central fish first. That’s what sticks in their minds. Japanese viewers will begin their recall with the background. They’ll also remember more about the seaweed and other objects in the scene.

Another social psychologist, Hazel Rose Markus, asked people arriving at San Francisco International Airport to fill out a survey and offered them a handful of pens to use, for example four orange and one green; those of European descent more often chose the one pen that stood out, while the Asians chose the one more like the others.

Dr. Markus and her colleagues found that these differences could affect health. Negative affect — feeling bad about yourself — has big, persistent consequences for your body if you are a Westerner. Those effects are less powerful if you are Japanese, possibly because the Japanese are more likely to attribute the feelings to their larger situation and not to blame themselves.

There’s some truth to the modernization hypothesis — that as social worlds become wealthier, they also become more individualistic — but it does not explain the persistent interdependent style of Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong.

In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways.

Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.

The authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years, rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”

Their test case was China, where the Yangtze River divides northern wheat growers from southern rice growers. The researchers gave Han Chinese from these different regions a series of tasks. They asked, for example, which two of these three belonged together: a bus, a train and train tracks? More analytical, context-insensitive thinkers (the wheat growers) paired the bus and train, because they belong to the same abstract category. More holistic, context-sensitive thinkers (the rice growers) paired the train and train tracks, because they work together.

Asked to draw their social networks, wheat-region subjects drew themselves larger than they drew their friends; subjects from rice-growing regions drew their friends larger than themselves. Asked to describe how they’d behave if a friend caused them to lose money in a business, subjects from the rice region punished their friends less than subjects from the wheat region did. Those in the wheat provinces held more patents; those in the rice provinces had a lower rate of divorce.