Esperanto was to become a universal language that would bring together enemies and friends in harmony across linguistic boundaries. This is how Ludwik Zamenhof, its inventor, a Jewish doctor in the Tsarist Russia of the 1800’s described his hopes for this language of peace:

“In Bialystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies…This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an ‘anguish for the world’ in a child. Since at that time I thought that ‘grown-ups’ were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil.”

http://www.u-matthias.de/latino/latin_en.htm#3

I think of Dr. Zamenhof wistfully as I engage in wars of understanding with myriads voice-activated devices and customer service lines. I seem to be at war with each of them, and they are definitely at war with each other. My car navigation wants me to distinctly enunciate SAN FRANCISCO as two separate words, while my AT&T directory doesn’t recognize the word no matter what I do; United customer service wants me to speak in a natural tone while my medical clinic expects me to sound like a robot; the satellite TV service likes high voices while the teleconference service I use is distinctly biased against women. When asked how many languages I speak, I can proudly say Russian, English, Ukrainian, bits of German and French, in addition to Sears toaster, car GPS, Aetna help line, and many others. I used to speak WildfFre (telephone based voice recognition agent) but I am a bit rusty now so don’t try to speak WildFire with me.

Esperanto in its own language means “one who hopes.” I hope that in the very near future there will emerge an Esperanto for appliances and customer services. I want harmony and peace to reign in my car, in my home, and anywhere and everywhere I go. Please?!!!

IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

I don’t know about you but I am feeling kind of bad about those poor Goldman Sachs investment bankers. Just a few months ago they looked so sad (remember those sad guys on the trading floor?). And now, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, after taking money from American taxpayers, they earn huge profits as if the credit crunch never happened. The 29,400 Goldmanites are expected to take in on average around $800,000 in pay, bonuses, and benefit packages. I can only imagine what this means for the top 400. But I worry that this is just not going to make them happy. And this is because research on happiness reveals some surprising things:

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IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

Whenever you are tempted to feel superior about our unique status as humans in the animal kingdom and our extraordinary achievements in building a sophisticated civilization, it is worth reading Frans De Waal, a Dutch primatologist who has studied apes for almost 40 years. Several years ago when I picked up his book “Our Inner Ape,” it quickly occurred to me that this is probably one of the best management books I’ve ever read. (OK, so I don’t like management books). Behaviors that we, humans, embellish with complex rationalizations and justifications, De Waal was able to observe with clarity among his subjects, apes. Making alliances to achieve power, engaging in acts of reciprocity to build and maintain social capital, puffing up to threaten the opponent and scare enemies — so ape and so human at the same time. So if you are looking for an entertaining, yet humbling experience, above is De Waal’s speech from 2004 at Pop!Tech.

IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

The title of this post is actually the name of the program started by the California Bluegrass Association, an organization that brings together young pickers, ages 3 to 18, to play at various bluegrass festivals. Before I, or more precisely, my son and his friends, found bluegrass, I could never imagine that this traditional American music genre could be the epicenter of young musical talent. And when I mean young, I mean very young. I’ve seen some amazingly hot pickers who are under 10! What I love about bluegrass festivals is that there is as much great music offstage as on, in the campground where small and large groups, many including very young musicians, jam together. Bluegrass is the ideal medium for these musicians. The basic chords are easy to learn, bluegrass jams are cross-generational affairs with pros often happy to share their skills with novices, and the music is highly social and ad hoc, i.e. you can play acoustic instruments virtually anywhere without any major set up. Although the chords are easy, the possibilities for virtuosity in this genre are immense (think Chris Thile , Bela Fleck , or Bryan Sutton). I also love the fact that at most any bluegrass festivals you can see the “stars,” mixing with the audience or standing in line for coffee just like anyone else. Imagine such a thing at a huge rock festival.

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IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

l find many things remarkable about psychiatrist George Vaillant‘s longitudinal studies of 268 Harvard men, not least of which is their time span — 72 years! To see someone transformed from a teenager to an old man is usually the stuff of fiction, not academic research. It turns out though that real lives are not that different from fiction, what with so many unpredictable twists and turns. What struck me most was the depth of personal transformations many of Vaillant’s subjects’ lives take. For example, starting out as a promising well-adjusted student with a loving family and later coming to resent your kin, seeing them as cold and detached; veering from a happy marriage to an affair with a much younger woman and eventual divorce; finding God, abandoning God, all in the span of one life. These transformations are so stark, some of the study participants barely recognize themselves when presented with vignettes of their past selves. As Joshua Wolf Shenk writes in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly:

“One of the men in the study at age 50 declared, “God is dead and man is very much alive and has a wonderful future.” He had stopped going to church, he said, when he arrived at Harvard. But as a sophomore, he had reported going to mass four times a week. When Vaillant sent this–and several similar vignettes–to the man for his approval to publish them, the man wrote back, “George, you must have sent these to the wrong person.” Vaillant writes, “He could not believe that his college persona could have ever been him. Maturation makes liars of us all.”

The stories reported in the study are complex yet familiar — they are not so different from stories of our own lives or those of our parents, grandparents, or others we know. I have come to view my own life as a progression of different personas — a young girl in Ukraine, a young professional in Silicon Valley, a mom of a teenager. At each stage, I was a different person with a different outlook on the world, different circumstances and sets of aspirations. Reminders of my past selves are contained in a few photographs tucked away in a shoe box that I occasionally bring out, a box of letters to my family in Odessa, and, more recently, increasingly growing compilations of videos, e-mails, online photos, etc.

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IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

For the past 8 years at Institute for the Future, we have been creating “artifacts from the future.” We see them as a means of converting abstract, high-level trends and future visions into tangible objects that help people internalize our forecasts. However, we do not view them as prototypes for building new products or services. Artifacts from the future are a good way to engage people in important conversations about the future and to elicit meaningful insights that hopefully lead to positive actions.

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IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

As my son gets ready to move out of the house to go to college, I’ve been thinking about another Russian writer who captures universal human themes that resonate over a hundred years later: Anton Checkhov. His story “Dushechka” or, in English translation, “The Darling,” has many layers of meaning. Indeed, the Russian word Dushechka originates from the Russian word “dusha” or soul, and thus the title alone has multiple meanings — soul mate, someone who is all soul, or has a great soul. I’m not going to do Dushechka justice in this post so please forgive me, dear Russian literature fanatics.

The heroine of “The Darling” is a young woman, Olenka, who becomes passionate about whatever her loved ones are involved in. First she marries a theater owner and all she talks about is theater. She speaks with contempt of the public, of its indifference to the arts, of its boorishness and insensitivity. She weeps at unfavorable revues and argues with editors. When her husband dies, she marries a timber merchant. Suddenly, lumber is the most fascinating subject on earth as far as Olenka is concerned. She manages her husband’s business affairs and dreams of boards, planks, beams, and joists. When the second husband dies, Olenka takes up with a veterinary surgeon. Her acquaintances find out about this simply because she suddenly becomes overwhelmingly concerned with the sanitary conditions of animals: “The health of domestic animals ought to be as well attended to as the health of human beings.” And so it goes.

It is hard to be a parent and completely avoid turning into a Dushechka just a bit, particularly in this day and age of high parental involvement. Whether we like it or not, we become engaged in our kids’ passions and pursuits, and often absorb them as our own. That brings me to baseball and bluegrass.

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IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

Yesterday I posted an essay on Socialstructing–creating organizations around social connections rather than against them. I believe these types of organizational forms are growing and diffusing rapidly throughout the economy. However, I do not see them as panaceas from all our ills since they have a potential to bring with them new kinds of inequalities, exclusions, and Ponzi schemes. So this post looks at potential unintended consequences of socialstructing.

One of the best things about speaking Russian (possibly the only thing), is that it gives you an ability to access Russian literature in the original. Over the years I’ve tried many different translations of Russian writers and was disappointed every time. Nothing compares to the original. Maybe it is impossible to do justice to these texts because many Russian words are so deeply rooted in a uniquely Russian context and life circumstances. What I love about writers such as Gogol and Chekhov is that in portraying life in 19th century Russia they managed to capture universal themes of human inner struggles, desires, and life ironies. They created prototypes of characters and circumstances that are as real today as they were 150 years ago. People just work through those circumstances with a whole new suite of tools and technologies.

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IFTF Executive Director Marina Gorbis guest blogged for BoingBoing.net from July 6 – 20, 2009. The following posts are excerpts from the series. For the full posts, click “Keep Reading” below or visit BoingBoing.net.

My mother knew well the value of social capital, although she probably never heard the term. In the Soviet Union where she lived and where I grew up one couldn’t survive without it. She traded social capital on a daily basis. It meant that despite being a widow with very little money, despite not having a high position or a membership in the “privileged” class (the Communist Party), she was able to provide a relatively good life for her family. We never worried about having enough food, my sister and I always wore fashionable (by Soviet standards, at least) clothes, took music and dance classes, went to good schools, spent summers by the seashore, went to the symphony, and otherwise took advantage of a lifestyle that seemed much beyond our means. How was my mother able to provide all these things? She certainly couldn’t afford them on her pitiful wages as a physician in a government-run clinic in Odessa, Ukraine. Social capital–networks of relationships with friends and acquaintances — is what accounted for her ability to provide for a relatively comfortable, albeit not luxurious, lifestyle.

While there was no meat to be found in any store in the city, my mother got it regularly (along with other provisions) through the director of a supermarket, who was also a husband of a close colleague. I got into music school in exchange for my mother treating the director of the school. We could get Western medicines because my mother was friendly with the head of a large local pharmacy. Our apartment was always filled with people who my mother was counseling, diagnosing, treating, and prescribing medicines for. No money was ever exchanged. Ever mindful of Stalin’s purges and his fabricated case against Jewish doctors’ alleged conspiracy to poison Soviet leadership, she was too afraid to have an underground private medical practice or take money for her services. “With my luck, I would be the first to be caught,” she always said. The people who could be regularly found in our home or whose homes she visited dispensing medical services were her substitutes for money. They and many other “connections” she built over a lifetime were her doors to resources — from tangible commodities such as food, medicines, and clothes, to information, services, and emotional support.

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