Where does the internet go next?

I alluded to it earlier (in this post), and now that it's up on Boingboing I may as well link again. This is brilliant. Jonathan Zittrain has a book out, available through the creative commons, and his thinking about where the internet wants to go and how to let it get there despite business is quite fascinating. The interview is fantastic, just great stuff. Here's my favorite excerpt from the excerpt:

It is not easy to imagine the PC going extinct, and taking with it the possibility of allowing outside code to run—code that is the original source of so much of what we find useful about the Internet. But along with the rise of information appliances that package those useful activities without readily allowing new ones, there is the increasing lockdown of the PC itself. PCs may not be competing with information appliances so much as they are becoming them. The trend is starting in schools, libraries, cyber cafés, and offices, where the users of PCs are not their owners. The owners’ interests in maintaining stable computing environments are naturally aligned with technologies that tame the wildness of the Internet and PC, at the expense of valuable activities their users might otherwise discover.

O How Beautiful, These Foreign Shores

Today in church a pulpit editorial was delivered, and it was a rather eloquent telling of the "Found Faith" story that is so integral to my denomination. We are, after all, a religion of converts, with numbers like 90% thrown around to describe how many Unitarian Universalists have their origins outside the faith. We are, it seems, on the verge of an exponential takeover, and listening time and again to the triumph and the revelation the accompanies the discovery of this non creedal faith, the momentum seems inevitable.

But the momentum isn't there. The 90% converts number was around when my mother was a youth raised in the church. While individual congregations grow, and some grow quite nicely, the vast majority of UU churches are small, and fission seems to be at least as common a trend than expansion. Of course, I'm basing that statement more on anecdotal evidence than on something like solid fact.

Closer to solid fact, we have this article from the latest issue of UU World magazine. The article does not detail the converts' experience, nor does it talk about the disparity between large and small congregations. Instead, it gives two numbers that would seem contrary: "675,000 adults in America broadly identify as Unitarian" and "The UUA’s 1,018 congregations in the United States counted just over 158,000 members". From this alone, it appears that we are shrinking. To underscore this, a survey among readers of UU World (who have to be members of a UU congregation) "showed... that only 12 percent were raised Unitarian Universalist". But this is all muddled - UUA congregations still attract a significant number of converts, and the faith is convincing enough for 500,000+ non-members to identify with. So what's going on?

The obvious point, and perhaps the most meaningful, is that the UUA is not meeting the needs of all Unitarians in the US. Certainly, it is meeting some needs, and enough needs to warrant its continued existence. And surely, their may well be many self-identified UUs who have no need for an such an organization. But between these two groups, we have a bit of a diaspora. It's a bit like the situation with YRUU, actually.

The trick then is to determine whether the current institutional structure is serving the needs of those who belong to it, to consider changes that can be made to reach out to those who are hesitant, and to acknowledge that one institution cannot be all things to all people. YRUU is often the first time that youths, en masse, re-prioritize their time away from Sunday morning RE to other commitments. It's an entirely appropriate time for a re-evaluation. Duncan, in the comments at YRUU UUlogy, says

Part of the conclusion that many people have reached (read: Ministers/staff) is that the entire MODEL of the youth group as it is largely practiced is not sufficient and should be scrapped. They believe that cons encourage youth to only attend cons and youth stop going to their churches. They think that too many youth leave after Coming Of Age, and they believe it is because YRUU groups don't meet a wide enough set of needs.

I think in my experience as an advisor a lot of youth leave because A)they had a deal with there folks that after CoA they are not forced to go B) other demands such as theatre or sports C) with other demands sometimes Sunday mornings are the only one in which people can sleep in. And not about the youth group.

And this is the second point I want to make here; this is why I opened with the converts experience. As the Coming of Age teachers at FUCA are fond of saying, "at the very heart of our seven principles is 'A free and responsible search for truth and meaning'". I cannot posit that all of the self-identified UU diaspora are the non-attending children of Unitarians, but I can safely say that some of it is. Because church, even an open and free church, is not for everybody all the time.

And that's the third part. We have in this nation the "Immigrant Experience" as a cultural narrative, and it is increasingly the dominant one. Not immigrants as in pilgrims, but as immigrants after the US was founded, who entered this country knowing what it was, without having been present for the formation. It's an interesting narrative, and a valid one, but it has complications of it's own, creating dissonance between those who acculturated into things like white privilege and those who can trace their heritage back to the very beginning when things like privilege were codified into law. This is not to say the UUism has nativist sentiment or a burden of guilt, but that sacred narrative, that powerful experience of how much better this is than the state we willingly left runs into trouble when youths, raised in the church and without the experience of conversion, find flaws in their parent's land of opportunity.

This is another narrative, the dual identity of our nation, our faith, and our congregations, and it's a complicated muddle. YRUU is only a part of the experience, but I think it's an important piece of UU identity, at least among convert teens and 2nd (or later) generations of UU youth. And odds are, a good many of us will take our free and responsible search for church and meaning within the denomination, provided that's allowed.

Not Euglogizing Hillary

The above phrase is from a Jezebel article, about what Hillary Clinton's run meant for, well, for lots of things. The writer starts by asking the obvious question (What went wrong?), and I like her answer:

What's sort of been ignored is one of the reasons everyone basically agrees that her candidacy was ultimately unsuccessful: she ran for months wearing the mantle of the experienced Washington insider (aka, the establishment) candidate. Please read that one more time, just on it's own. She ran as the establishment candidate.

Hedging Our Bets

It used to be more of a point of mine in the past, but I've always had a notion that the ultimate human goal is to escape earth. Evolutionarily, it makes sense - we want lots of populations to evolve in different places and to safeguard our species for perpetuity, or at least until we reach some cosmic singularity. So I'm a big fan of Warren Ellis' latest post on colonizing Mars. The bit that intrigued me (found via R Stevens) is here:

And while I did indeed just say that no kind of extinction is good, it should also be pointed out that giving up a bolthole for human breeding pairs — which are, make no mistake, the stakes on a Martian colonisation drive — on the basis that we might kill something less substantial and self-aware than a cough is no way to run a railroad.

Excerpt from "Chasing the Flame"

I just started reading Chasing the Flame. It's good so far, but I may be the target demographic - it is, after all about a career civil servant in the UN. Exactly my cuppa tea. Anyway, here's the best line so far, which is a quote from Sergio Vieira de Mello:

The UN is such a statist organization. If we played by UN rules, wouldn't have a clue what the people with power and guns were plotting.

This is from 1981, with regards to the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon at the time, and it's incredibly relevant today. One of the fundamental problems with the UN, it seems to me, is that it was built to prevent another WWII, a war which was not all about states, but was largely about states. The political necessity has changed and requires the UN (and nations in conflict in general) to move away from a simple nation vs nation understanding of conflict.

Seating Delegates

There's a lot to be said about what to do with the Michigan and Florida delegates. Christine's take, over at iMinister, is my favorite.

Quoting Jezebel

Jezebel is a blog that maybe you have heard of. It's good, and flawed in its ways like all blogs. What I like about it is the stuff it does as a watchdog on the sexism vs. racism debate among democrats. Particularly striking was a piece today that was a counterpoint to an OP-ED piece Geraldine Ferraro wrote. The counter can be found here. Excerpted below is the best point of the critique:

Racial resentment, Geraldine, is racism. Why can't you see that? People coming up to you and complaining that they can't complain about black people is them complaining for being looked down upon for being racists! And, yes, their time ought to have passed, it should pass, they should learn and understand that racism should have no place in our society and as a party leader, a stalwart, a barrier-breaker you should be breaking it to them that "getting treated fairly for being white" means losing sometimes, and sometimes it means losing to a person of color. It means you are not always going to come out ahead, it means that the advantages your fathers or mothers faced 40 or 50 years ago (or less long ago than that) because of the color of their skin should disappear and you should lose to better-qualified candidates of color and then you should not ever, ever even in the dark recesses of your small, reptilian brain think "Well, that's what affirmative action has wrought in this country," because that, Geraldine is racism. And it's there, and it's palpable and the fact that you are the educated white Reagan Democrats standard bearer for how sexism is worse than racism and it's not really racism if it's just "racial resentment" makes me sick to my fucking stomach.