70 Books (and Other Resources) for Internal Change Agents

May you dream of mossy trees and barn owls ...

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, tooImagine all the people living life in peace
~John Lennon

How to review a book

Today, The Verge is publishing an interim edition of Sarah Jeong’s The Internet of Garbage, a book she first published in 2015 that has since gone out of print. It is a thorough and important look at the intractable problem of online harassment.

After a year on The Verge’s staff as a senior writer, Sarah recently joined The New York TimesEditorial Board to write about technology issues. The move kicked off a wave of outrage and controversy as a group of trolls selectively took Sarah’s old tweets out of context to inaccurately claim that she is a racist. This prompted a further wave of unrelenting racist harassment directed at Sarah, a wave of coverage examining her tweets, and a final wave of coverage about the state of outrage generally. This is all deeply ironic because Sarah laid out exactly how these bad-faith tactics work in The Internet of Garbage.

Lost in all of this noise was the fact that Sarah Jeong is an actual person — a person who was an integral and beloved part of The Verge’s team and a deeply respected journalist for years before that. Her extensive reporting on online communities, norms, and harassment is rigorous and insightful in a way that few others have ever matched. Discussing Sarah’s tweets in a vacuum without contending with her life’s actual work in the very field of online communities and harassment is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

The Internet of Garbage provides an immediate and accessible look at how online harassment works, how it might be categorized and distinguished, and why the structure of the internet and the policies surrounding it are overwhelmed in fighting it. Sarah has long planned to publish an updated and expanded second edition, but in this particular moment, I am pleased that she’s allowed us to publish this interim edition with a new preface.

In that new preface, Sarah stresses that her original text was written from a place of optimism. But the years since have not been kind to internet culture. She writes that the tactics of Gamergate, so clearly on display during the harassment campaign waged against her over the last few weeks, have “overtaken our national political and cultural conversations.” That new culture is driven by the shape of the internet and the interactions it fosters. “We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas,” she writes.

I hope everyone with a true and sincere interest in improving our online communities reads The Internet of Garbage and contends with the scope of the problem Sarah lays out in its pages. We are making the entire text of The Internet of Garbage 1.5 available for free as a PDF, ePub, and.mobi ebook file, and for the minimum allowed price of $.99 in the Amazon Kindle store. Below, we have excerpted Chapter 3, “Lessons from Copyright Law.”

—Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief, The Verge

A list of more than 100 nonfiction articles from 2017 "that will stand the test of time". That's your end-of-the-summer beach reading sorted then.

 Michele Gelfand rocks ... .  She is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and has a new book coming out: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Out World.  Here is part of the Amazon summary:

Why are clocks in Germany so accurate while those in Brazil are frequently wrong? Why do New Zealand’s women have the highest number of sexual partners? Why are “Red” and “Blue” States really so divided? Why was the Daimler-Chrysler merger ill-fated from the start? Why is the driver of a Jaguar more likely to run a red light than the driver of a plumber’s van? Why does one spouse prize running a “tight ship” while the other refuses to “sweat the small stuff?”

In search of a common answer, Gelfand has spent two decades conducting research in more than fifty countries. Across all age groups, family variations, social classes, businesses, states and nationalities, she’s identified a primal pattern that can trigger cooperation or conflict. Her fascinating conclusion: behavior is highly influenced by the perception of threat.

“If you don’t have genuine faith that you can evolve a better company by listening to what your customers, prospects, investors, vendors, and partners have to say, then a blogging effort will not provide you with its full value. If you don’t want to listen – REALLY listen – then blogs will be thorny for you and your culture. If you can’t be candid about your company’s dirty laundry, then blogging probably isn’t for you. If you insist your company doesn’t have dirty laundry, then your company may be too boring to write about. Every company has its share of problems. If you aren’t willing to discuss them with some degree of openness, then you’ll be missing a huge amount of power that the blog could bring to your company. People are hungry for companies that have conversations with them – warts and all. They tend to distrust companies that try to say ‘everything’s perfect here.'” (Naked Conversations, Page 146)

I Run From You: German Train Station To Play Schoenberg To Drive Out Drug Dealers

 

70 Books (and Other Resources) for Internal Change Agents

Via John Cutler – “Multiple hat-wearer. Product development nut. I love wrangling complex problems and answering the why with qual/quant data. @johncutlefish on Twitter.”

“What books / research / models / frameworks might you recommend for change agents with low/no positional authority hoping to coax their orgs in a new direction?” See – 70 Books (and Other Resources) for Internal Change Agents

Why (Almost) Every Company Should Stop Procrastinating and Start Blogging NOW

Sex, Helen of Troy and women in history and sex ...

Helen of Troy has been established as a primal whore, a deceiver – in a long line of sexually powerful women whose purpose is credited as being to bring down men, whose sex life is viewed as betrayal in pursuit of furtherment, perpetuating the ancient notion that female lust pollutes male intellect. To use the words of Jeffrey Toobin: ‘As is demonstrated by the history of scandal from Helen of Troy to Monica of Beverly Hills, sex has a way of befogging the higher intellectual faculties.’

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