Big Picture in 5 Mins transcript with credits

“This is  The Big Picture in 5 Minutes,   woven from direct quotes from civic participators found and curated by KIP   on social media for the past 9 years.” - KIP      

“Saying   “I don’t pay attention to politics” today is equivalent to saying “I don’t pay attention to volcanos”   in Pompeii in seventy-nine A D.” - Hari Kondabalu

“What many people may have failed to realize is that   this isn’t politics anymore,   it’s an   information   war.” - Rodney Caston

”We are in the middle of a global war between Liberal Democracies and Kleptocratic Authoritarians financed by organized crime   and the super rich. ”- @JayRouseDC

”We’re at an inflection point in Human History. All over the planet. And the Earth itself. All of history. All of our ancestors. All of our progeny. We’re in this together. ”  - @DrGJack Brown

”What binds these people?   It’s the oil.      It’s peak oil   facing a future   of renewables.   It’s carbon finance   versus   climate finance. ”    - anonymous member of a FB group

”What if   the fascists   not only believe in climate change   but are already working to ensure their own maximum protection from the fallout   through   extreme wealth and power   accumulation?”   - Pedro Nicolaci da Costa

”Corruption is why the United States hasn’t acted on climate change. ”  - unknown

”It’s almost as if criminal billionaires are loyal to each other   and not a country or ideology… ” - @WI_politics_now

” Working against   the rest of us    and society's   goals.   …with “Iron Triangles”   of organized criminals,   corrupt government officials,   and business leaders.” - KIP

 And it is” not just about criminal rule of the U.S.   “It is about criminal rule in ALL global democracies,   and a multipolar realignment    of global geopolitical power   where the US and global democracies   have a much diminished role.” - genericperson04 on Twitter

“If you see billionaires   using platforms to give Putin cover,   just push them aside in your minds eye   to see the early oligarch funders of their fortunes.  And considering those oligarchs were birthed out of the Kremlin, perhaps now you can see the malevolence afoot, all this time. We’ve just allowed the underworld’s wealth and aims to swamp and divide…until its bosses were in control of nation states resources   and laws -   to thieve   without consequence.   That is what this moment is about.  Gangsters taking their shot.”   - @lincolnsbible 

 “The threat to democracy in the 1940s was totalitarianism. The threat to democracy today is billionaires:   media, money, and influence.”   - @protecttruth_

“To cause demoralization,   desensitization,   fracture alliances and networking, degrade trust, undermine authority,   disrupt information flow, create chaos and confusion,   and generally contribute to the injury and destabilization of western democracy.” - @USHadrons

“If it’s being done for marketing,   it can be done for manipulating voters.” - Aaron Marks

“It’s easy to be an online campaign genius   if you have foreign intelligence and Facebook handing over all the answers.”  - Rachel Larris 

"2016’s  meme army was proof of concept for an info war in 2020."  - Charlie Warzel

“So much of the GOP is complicit. Either they get away with stealing our democracy   or they go to jail.”   - @CurtisMCauliff 

“We started KIP because we kept hearing people say “it’s big.    It’s bigger than you think.    It’s all connected.” But we were Feeling blind, baffled.    Then digging more, and seeing what they mean. - KIP     

 “It could be argued   that International organized crime & their infiltration of industry, finance & politics is the primary reason why our political aspirations have essentially stagnated for the past few decades; That paradigm is nearing it's end. The zeitgeist is   in it's   death throes.”-  @spiralcow     

”It all boils down to the fact that with the collapse of the USSR, Western democracies opened up their markets in good faith to a new state that was allegedly a fellow democratic republic, while it clandestinely explicitly used access to those markets to subvert their democracies.”  - @spiralcow

 “Manufactured scandal   weaponized against honest politicians   by a transnational crime syndicate,   utilizing the military intelligence apparatus of enemy states   to achieve corrupt criminal rule   of the largest economy on earth.  They will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.”   -  @frannywild

”At KIP we know our news and information landscape has changed. Our map makers have changed.   We need to start listening   to the people in our networks   who are doing the hard work of parsing this all,   people motivated,   sharing good information,   organizing thoughts,    using their skills to connect the dots. ”  - KIP

”At KIP   We’re calling for something new.    Imagine Fifth Estate   Pulitzer Prizes. We call them Cassandra Awards,   for the best civic participators.   We need them   after the corporate capture of the Fourth Estate   by interests linked to transnational organized crime. ”   - KIP

”Who's connecting dots for you   in media literacy,   critical thinking,   civic responsibility,    holding power   to account?” - KIP

/end of transcript of The Bigger Picture in 5 Minutes from KIP’s Cassandra Awards nominees

TBT, my Global Niche journey in my TEDU talk pitch for TED GLOBAL 2010

Stumbled on this long ago pitch - to speak at a side event of TED Global conference in Oxford in 2010. To talk about our global self that can be found through online social networking.

I was having a great time with it, and early, as an expatriate! Those sure were golden days of wide open online life and exploration, glad I got to experience them. Nothing like today’s terrordome of trolls and info ops.

Posting this as a Throwback Thursday, to a time when I was thinking about our potential to connect globally (and yet refusing to use a common tongue to do it?! 😅), when in November 2024 my attention has been turning more and more to offline local community.

“We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation. ”

— Me in 2010

A MOST DIFFICULT NO-BRAINER: global citizens still need to find a place in the world

We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation.

A global identity can seem nebulous and ungrounded, while something concrete and localized makes more sense. Problem with concrete though: it cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

There’s good news in this era of globalization. I believe we’re entering a permanent state of psychic limbo, a place where our concrete center won’t hold. Too many of us know the bittersweet liminality of living between multiple worlds, and the soul-sprung righteousness of refusing to settle on just one. 

This 600-word talk is synthesized from ~six months of my blogposts at Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation and includes revelations from my 13 years of identity struggle as an expatriate in 4 countries, the virtual community of cultural peers I created with the book Tales from the Expat Harem and the current online neoculture community expat+HAREM, and my work as a cultural producer and host of the hybrid identity discussion series Dialogue2010,  two years in-depth experience in social media with a focus on location independence and self actualization.

I’ll cover our changing sense of peers, the exquisite pull of online social networking -- as opposed to the usual blunt force push of social circumstance -- and how that demands more value and relevance from our connections, and us, and how fashioning a hybrid lifestyle to honor all the worlds we live in taps into our own global being. I call it finding your global niche, a psychic solution to a global identity crisis. 

I end with a metaphor for this kind of fluid identity (bobbing buoy tied to a point deep below surface of changing options, existing in a wider orbit around the inner me so I can be more versions of myself) and extrapolate that to the issue of global citizenship. Putting distance between yourself and your global citizenship offers more fluid points of connection, as well as an anchor. I suggest creating ‘psychic location independence’ to truly be a citizen of the world. 

Cassandra Awards for our news and information mapmakers

“Our news & information landscape has changed. Our mapmakers have changed. ”

— Announcing The Cassandra Awards for civic participators/participatory media/Fifth Estate content creators, dot connectors, and sense makers in our networks

Image: Using AI voice generation for an audio script of numerous quotes from my curated KIP (“Knowledge is Power”) sources on Twitter/Xitter which begin to tell the larger story of this moment, all in 5 minutes. Read the whole transcript here.

Image: This is the conclusion. I announce The Cassandra Awards. You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.

LISTEN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE

You can listen here or read the transcript with credits here

“You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.”

— I invite you all to check their receipts.

With The Cassandra Awards and other information interfaces for you to engage with, my passion project KIP aims to re-educate the entire population in digital media literacy, information literacy, digital civic literacy, and help de-program those who have fallen victim to disinformation.

Education in digital civics literacy as a countermeasure to disinformation says Swedish psychological defense research

Take a look at the working paper by professors in Education in Uppsala University and the School of Psychological Science at University of Western Australia.

”The report addresses the critical role of the education system in empowering individuals with the knowledge, skills, and constructive attitudes necessary to navigate a complex and often misleading information landscape.”

Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

Let's recap

I nominate Stephanie LB @LincolnsBible Black for a Cassandra Award.

Here’s the summer before. 2018.

“Treason is the reason for the season, someone said on Twitter.

I shared it on my Instagram along with contemporary Tweets from Louis Neufeld who was very early on many germane threads that drive our headlines today. Her 2017 threads deserve a receipts challenge. I nominate her for a Cassandra Award.

Information war victims come for the meteorologists

Now they’re coming for the meteorologists. The right wing radio chemtrail folklore spawns death threats.

Another civilian victim of a military grade information war: he threatens to hang a meteorologist for treason. After the election we'll need to rehabilitate the information space and all the people who say "treason" but don't know where to pin it just like all the January 6, 2021 Capitol Attack insurrection dupes that are going to prison.

KIP and projects like it that can rehabilitate consumers of disinformation are greatly needed.