The man in the photo, science historian and broadcaster James Burke, is a revolutionary. So pay attention. This is important.

I don’t mean “revolutionary” in the lame-arsed sense used by every pissant little company with a new kind of double-whacko widget that’ll “revolutionise” the double-whacko widget industry. Because it’s now available in three different colours.

No, I mean the real kind of revolutionary: someone who advocates a revolution — yes, as in a complete overthrow of the established political system.

I’ve just finished watching Burke’s ten-part TV series from 1985, The Day The Universe Changed. It’s available on DVD, but you can also do what I did and watch the whole thing on YouTube. At least until some copyright-addled arsehole decides that you can’t.

As Wikipedia says:

The series’ primary focus is on the effect of advances in science and technology on western philosophy. The title comes from the philosophical idea that the universe essentially only exists as you perceive it through what you know; therefore, if you change your perception of the universe with new knowledge, you have essentially changed the universe itself.

To illustrate this concept, James Burke tells the various stories of important scientific discoveries and technological advances and how they fundamentally altered how western civilization perceives the world.

Apart from anything else, TDTUC is an excellent history of western scientific thought. But, after taking you on this journey, Burke’s final episode is a revolutionary call to action.

Here’s the final minutes:

We still go on believing that today’s version of things is the only right one because… we can only handle one way of seeing things at a time. We’ve never had systems that would let us do more than that, so we’ve always had to have conformity, with a current view.

Disagree with the Church, and you were punished as a heretic. With the political system, as a revolutionary. With the scientific establishment, as a charlatan. With the educational system, as a failure.

If you didn’t fit the mould, you were rejected.

But, ironically, the latest product of that way of doing things is a new instrument, a new system that while it could make conformity more rigid, more totalitarian that ever before in history, it could also blow everything wide open. Because with it, we could operate on the basis that values and standards and ethics and facts and truth all depend on what your view of the world is — and that there may be as many views of that as there are people.

And with this [brandishing a computer microchip] capable of keeping a tally on those millions of opinions voiced electronically, we might be able to lift the limitations of conforming to any centralised representational form of government — originally invented because there was no way for everybody’s voice to be heard.

You might be able to give everybody unhindered, untested access to knowledge, because the computer would do the day-to-day work for which we once qualified the select few in an educational system originally designed for a world where only the few could be taught.

You might end the regimentation of people living and working in vast unmanageable cities, uniting them instead in an electronic community where the Himalayas and Manhattan were only a split second apart.

You might, with that and much more, break the mould that has held us back since the beginning, in a future world that we would describe as balanced anarchy and they will describe as an open society, tolerant of every view, and where there is no single, privileged way of doing things — above all, able to do away with the greatest tragedy of our era: the centuries-old waste of human talent that we couldn’t or wouldn’t use.

Utopia? Why?

If, as I’ve said all along, the universe is at any time what you say it is, then say!

Now a few people are poking around the edges of this revolution. But how many actually comprehend the full breadth and depth of what’s going on?

Here in Australia, Senator Kate Lundy‘s Public Sphere events have started scratching the surface. At the state level, Penny Clarke MLC is kicking off the NSW Sphere next month, at which I’ll probably be speaking.

And yet, as I say, these events are only scratching the surface.

Why?

Because they’re looking at how the tools of Web 2.0 and beyond can be used to support the existing national and state governments and their institutions and instrumentalities. Because they still imagine that central authorities make everything happen. Because they still imagine that the role of the citizenry is to participate in systems set up for them by that central authority, instead of just autonomously doing things for themselves.

The true revolution is that the existing national and state governments and their institutions and instrumentalities will become irrelevant.

As Clay Shirky has pointed out, a 3-million article Wikipedia was knocked off in only the number of man-hours Americans spend watching TV advertising in one weekend. One weekend!

As Open Australia has demonstrated, just a handful of people can create a better and more flexible system for reading parliamentary debates than parliament itself.

As Mark Pesce has pointed out, old-fashioned hierarchical organisations actually get in the way of new systems emerging. And you can watch him say that on video.

So…

Imagine what might be possible when the burden of clunky hierarchical dinosaur-organisations is removed. Imagine what might be done with 51 more weekends-full of community participation. Then, as James Burke says… then say it!

This is Juma Hassan lila Kalibu, secretary of Kilimani [see update below] village in Zanzibar, showing off the village school’s new computer room. As you can see, it has no computers. Or electricity. Or desks. Or chairs. Or anything, really.

When I visited this village last Sunday as part of ActionAid Australia‘s Project TOTO — this school is one of their projects — it was a striking example of what we’d been discussing the previous day with ActionAid’s Zanzibar team: the poverty web. You can’t just dump one single piece of modernity into the poor rural environment and expect everything to work. As James Burke’s classic TV series Connections showed, modern Western civilisation is a built on a web of interlocking technologies, processes, structures and institutions, and you need all of them to make things work.

Kilimani has none of them.

Kilimani is literally a series of mud-brick huts. I’ll post more photos later — but this school, with its concrete floor and rendered walls, is as far ahead of the villagers’ homes as a medieval cathedral was ahead of the peasant hovels that clustered nearby. It’s appropriate, I think, that everywhere I’ve travelled in Tanzania, education is seen as the key to future prosperity. Well, not prosperity exactly, but whatever’s one notch up on the scale from abject poverty.

Consider this. Computers need electricity, amongst other things. Even if you string in the wires to connect this village to the power grid, someone might decide that the scrap metal value of the copper wires is more important to them than the electricity right now. A family in poor parts of the Tanzanian mainland might have a total annual cash income of TZS 150,000. That’s about AUD 120. When you only have $10 a month, a couple dollars of copper represents significant wealth — and at the mine we visited in Nzega in northern Tanzania yesterday they have to post guards to stop people stealing the water pipes and fences.

OK, assuming the wires and transformers aren’t stolen, what happens when something breaks? Who’s paying for the spare parts? Who’s trained to do the work? What use is a technical college when there are no teachers? Who’d come to work as a teacher when the homes have no electricity or running water? A basic education is a pathway out of here! So you need electricity to attract the teachers to… um, but that’s where we started!

How do you unravel this poverty web? Buggered if I know! But that’s the challenge facing countries like Tanzania. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of things we take for granted in the West simply aren’t there, and all the things you need to build those things are not there. They could be bought, sure, but there isn’t the money.

Money. There you have it.

Juma Hassan lila Kalibu, dressed in his Sunday best to greet his honoured guests, is certainly proud of his school, the most magnificent building in the village. And he would like our help. Some paper would be nice. And some pens.

[Update 13 June 2010: I have just discovered that this village is not called Kilimani at all. Kilimani is the location of the Zanzibar Beach Resort, just south of Zanzibar Town. That's the hotel where we stayed overnight in Zanzibar — and be warned, their web is a dreadful slow-to-load Flash job with looping music that can't be turned off. It's quite possible this village is called Kisimani, located here on Google Maps and not marked at all on Bing Maps. I will investigate.]

Yes, Stilgherrian Live episode 44 is now online for your viewing pleasure.

For some reason, I think it’s actually one of the best programs I’ve done. But maybe that’s just my reaction to the opening monologue. You be the judge.

You were the judge, of course, in choosing our “Cnut of the Week”. Senator Penny Wong, Australia’s Minister for Climate Change, and Tom Koutsantonis, South Australia’s disgraced ex-Minister for Road Safety — who I consistently called Tony Koutsantonis for some reason — drew for third place (17%). And in equal first place were neocon robot Karl Rove for his comments about torture and person-on-television Oprah Winfrey for something about Twitter I forget (33%). Which is weird, because I’m sure that as I closed the poll Oprah was in the lead. I blame the bees.

Bees can be blamed for most of the world’s ills.

I also spoke about Ashton Kutcher while showing a picture of Zac Efron, which actually proves my point that they’re all interchangeable muppets anyway.

As the Snarky Platypus says, “They all feel the same in the dark”.

There was a song at the end. And a duck. A duck and a dog, in fact.

It was my very great pleasure today to discover that James Burke‘s groundbreaking TV series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are all on YouTube.

Connections is more than 30 years old now — it was first broadcast in 1978 — and yet the way it weaves its threads through the history of science is still relevant to a contemporary audience. One thing I did notice, though, is how bleak his worries are, obviously an element of the Cold War mentality of the time.

Burke’s witty writing is a key part of the enjoyment, as this snippet from episode 2 shows:

I suppose Shakeaspeare and the travel agents have done more than anybody else to give us our Technicolor view of Elizabethan England, starring the Queen herself as a kind of swashbuckler in pearls. The fact is, about all she had time for was bookkeeping. When she took the place over in 1558, it was National Disaster Week. The money was worthless. There was no money! There was plague. The cities were packed and stinking.

Elizabeth appealed to the decent English middle class, with their healthy desire for prestige, power, fun and games, and cash. Soon, anybody who wanted to be anybody was on the make. And none more than that famous bunch of privateering seadogs led by Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins, who sailed the Atlantic looking for new American trade opportunities for England, setting up colonies, knocking off Spanish galleons — and doing it all with a kind of gutsy disregard for convention that we describe today as “criminal”.

I’ve often wanted to make programs like Burke’s. He gives hope to someone who, like him, has “a good face for radio”. I know that re-watching these old favourites will be important in many ways.

There is no such thing as a “space”.

There is such a thing as a market — that’s a group of people who will directly or indirectly pay money for something.

There is such a thing as a product — that’s an offering of a new kind of good or service that is brought to a market.

There is such a thing as a company — that’s an organized business entity that brings a product to a market.

Marc’s article goes on to explain why there’s no such thing as “Web 2.0″ either — in fact that’s its main thrust. It’s worth reading.

Hell, his entire blog is worth reading.

On the other hand, William Shakespeare is worth reading too.

So are P J O’Rourke, Daniel Petre, George Orwell, David Marr, John Birmingham, James Burke, George Lakoff, Brian Eno, Lao Tsu, Sherry Turkle, Steven Levy, Neal Stephenson, Umberto Eco, Richard Watts, Paul Graham, Bruce Schneier, Father Bob Maguire, Matt Ridley, Daniel Dennett, Zern Liew, Steven Levitt… but you’ve just got to draw the line somewhere!