Capitalism Five Ways, Animated

What smiling has to do with personal redemption and the economic outlook.

Is RSA the new TED? During the past year, the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (RSA) has burst onto the scene, offering a steady diet of videos created with a TED-like formula. They’re short. They’re animated and visually snappy. And they’re substantive too. But while TED is all about bringing the inspiration, RSA videos tend toward critique. Take the four videos below. Though varied in focus, they all circle around a common theme — the flaws running through our contemporary capitalist system.

DANIEL PINK: DRIVE

First up, Daniel Pink, the bestselling author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, makes the point that traditional motivation schemes – namely, bonuses – rarely achieve their intended results. Research repeatedly finds that the bigger the bonus, the worse the performance. (Hello CEOs.) So what does motivate us? The desire to be self-directed. Or what Pink calls “the purpose motive.”

BARBARA EHRENREICH: SMILE OR DIE

In the United States, we’re all about positive psychology. Optimism is built into our DNA. But if you ask Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the bestselling book Nickel and Dimed, she’ll tell you it’s not such a good thing. In short, positive thinking keeps getting us nickeled and dimed.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK: FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE

Slavoj Zizek, one of today’s most influential philosophers/theorists, picks up where Ehrenreich leaves off. Reworking Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, or that strange relationship between money making and personal redemption, Zizek gives you this observation. Increasingly, modern capitalism tries to blur the boundaries between making purchases and doing social good. We’re made to feel like we’re creating good karma every time we buy. It’s a bit of hoodwinking that keeps us happy and spending, and our eyes off the ball.

STEPHEN DUBNER & STEVEN LEVITT: SUPERFREAKONOMICS

And then to pull this thread along a little further. Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of the bestselling Freakonomics, dig into economic research that shows this dark reality: On the economic field, there’s no such thing as altruists. Players that look altruistic are greedy in the end.

DAVID HARVEY: CRISES OF CAPITALISM

What caused the 2008 financial crisis? Many have assumed that the capitalist system somehow malfunctioned. Credit default swaps and liar loans – they piled up and caused an otherwise good system to go down. But David Harvey, a long left-leaning social theorist and geographer, takes things a step further. The crisis was built into capitalism itself, he argues. It was part of capitalism’s internal logic. And, with that, we get the most penetrating critique.

All of these videos are excerpts of longer lectures, each running about 30 minutes. You can watch them in full here: Pink, Ehrenreich, Zizek, Dubner/Levit and Harvey. And when you do, you’ll really see how well the medium enhances the message.

Dan Colman edits Open Culture, which brings you the best free educational media available on the web — free online courses, audio books, movies and more. By day, he directs the Continuing Studies Program at Stanford University, and you can also find him on Twitter.

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Bees, Bees, Bees: Celebrating an Amazing Creature

10,000 buzzing pixels, the real source of your breakfast, and what electron microscopes have to do with art.

Albert Einstein once remarked that if bees were to disappear, mankind would perish in just a few years. And yet honeybees are disappearing — at alarming rates, and for reasons scientists don’t fully understand. From climate change to cell phone towers, a range of manmade and environmental factors are contributing to the extinction of a brilliant, intelligent civilization responsible for everything from one of the world’s most ancient medicinal products to the foundation of swarm theory to the creation of other-worldly petal nests.

Today, we look at three different homages to bees, their socio-environmental significance, and the plight for their conservation.

BEE BILLBOARD

To promote Britain’s Plan Bee campaign, UK winery Banrock Station created the world’s first bee-powered billboard, composed of 10,000 live bees.

Plan Bee aims to campaign against the use of bee-killing pesticides and to inspire people to help bees in their own gardens.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP: A PLEA FOR BEES

Apiarist Dennis vanEngelsdorp studies colony collapse disorder — the disturbing worldwide epidemic wiping out worker bees and Western honeybees, resulting in the demise of entire colonies of the gentle, fascinating creature. But this is no tragedy we can observe from a bystander perspective — bees and their work are surprisingly integral to our entire food system, from the breakfast you ate this morning to large-scale agricultural economy.

One in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees.” ~ Dennis vanEngelsdorp

There are more species of bees than mammals and birds combined.” ~ Dennis vanEngelsdorp

For more on colony collapse disorder, check out the fascinating documentary Vanishing of the Bees, which follows two commercial beekeepers as they struggle to keep their bees healthy and alive, then offers ways for you to make your own living space, be it urban or countryside, more bee-friendly.

ROSE-LYNN FISHER: BEE

From photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher comes BEE — an incredibly artful, thoughtful exploration of the beautiful complexity of bees and the larger natural patterns it bespeaks. Fisher blends the immaculate scientific precision of electron microscope imaging with the aesthetic sensibility of art photography to produce 128 pages of breathtaking revelation that expands the boundaries of how we think about these remarkable creatures and nature at large.

Abdomen at 23x zoom – foreshortened view of the abdomen with sting | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Wing at 170x zoom – the hamuli attaching to the wing fold | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Wing hooks at 700x zoom – a closer view of the hamuli | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

The first time I looked at a bee’s eye magnified I was amazed to see a field of hexagons, just like honeycomb. I wondered, is this a coincidence or a clue? Is it simply that hexagons are ubiquitous in nature, or is there a deeper correspondence between the structure of the bee’s vision and the structure she builds – in other words, similar frequencies being expressed in similar form? This got me pondering on the connection between vision and action at a more abstract, metaphoric level. Is there a parallel kind of encoding relevant to humanity? At a refined level of our own nature, does our deeper capacity to see and to do correspond with an intrinsic structuring?” ~ Rose-Lynn Fisher

Body at 75x zoom – one abdominal sclerite (plate) overrides the next | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Antenna at 900x zoom – plate and peg sensila of the flagellum | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Images via NPR

BEE came out last week and is without a doubt one of the most visually stunning, conceptually ambitious photography books of the year.

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What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Primates, philosophers, and how subjectivity ensures the absolute truth of our existence.

What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our existence. And yet the diversity of views and opinions is so grand it has made that answer remarkably elusive. While we don’t necessarily believe such an “answer” — singular and conclusive by definition — even exists, today we make an effort to understand the wholeness of a human being without compartmentalizing humanity into siloed views of the brain, emotion, morality and so forth. So we look at this complex issue from three separate angles — evolutionary biology, philosophy and neuroscience — hoping weave together a somewhat more holistic understanding of the whole.

THE LEAKEY FOUNDATION ON HUMANNESS

From The Leakey Foundation, which aims to increase scientific knowledge and public understanding of human origins, evolution, behavior, and survival, comes What Makes Us Human? — a multifaceted exploration of who we are as a species and how we came to be that way. Barely 8 minutes long, the film features an astounding all-star cast of scientists — Jane Goodall, Robert Sapolsky, Richard Wrangham, Steven Pinker, Eugenie Scott and more — and tackles a number of complex,

There is a lot more biology to our behavior than we used to think.” ~ Richard Wrangham

Though the film is essentially an ad for The Leakey Foundation, that’s more than okay given that over the past half-century, the foundation has stepped up to the government’s consistent failure to properly fund scientific research and practically launched the careers of some of the greatest scientists of our time — Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas, Don Johanson, Richard Wrangham, Daniel Lieberman, and even Jane Goodall herself.

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DAN DENNETT ON CONSCIOUSNESS

Dan Dennett is one of today’s most prominent and prolific philosophers. In this excellent 2003 TED talk, he exposes the flawed and often downright misleading way in which we (mis)understand our consciousness, perpetuated by the many tricks our brains play on us.

It’s very hard to change people’s minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody’s an expert on consciousness.” ~ Dan Dennett

For more of Dennett’s illuminating insight, take a look at The Crucible of Consciousness: An Integrated Theory of Mind and Brain, which builds on Dennett’s iconic — and must-read — 1992 book, Consciousness Explained.

ANTONIO DAMASIO ON CONSCIOUSNESS

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is among the world’s leading researchers on the neurobiology of mind and behavior, focusing more specifically on emotion, memory, decision-making, communication and creativity. In this compelling BigThink interview, Damasio gives a basic definition of “consciousness”

Consciousness is the special quality of mind, the special features that exist in your mind, that permit us to know, for example, that we ourselves exist and that things exist around us. And that is something more than just your mind. Mind allows us to portray in different sensory modalities — visual, auditory, olfactory, you name it — what we are like and what the world is like, but this very, very important quality of subjectivity is the quality that allows us to take a distant view and say, ‘I am.’” ~ Antonio Damasio

Damasio’s new book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, comes out in November but is already available for pre-order — which we highly recommend, since it’s an absolute must-read.

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