Greetings from Carolina! I’m bored to tears at work so I decided to check out your site on my iphone during lunch break. I enjoy the knowledge you present here and can’t wait to take a look when I get home. I’m shocked at how quick your blog loaded …

Stephen

I was wondering if you accept guest post for your blog. If you do, I would like to submit a few. I’m a recent college graduate, with an English major, looking to build out my portfolio. I can write on a wide variety of topics and am sure you would be happy with the quality. Please email me back if you are interested. Thank you for your time.

- Kathleen Hubert
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002374243662

I have to apologize! Obviously I never made it to the end of your work or I would have had a totally different take on this epic construct.

I am short on time to think through my response; suffice to say I will be in touch, for I sense there is more I would like to convey than the simple respect I can provide right now.

Stephen

srdill at me .com

Have to address this.

The manifesto is not a group work, but rather my own, and it is signed as such at the end.

Would I have preferred that it be a collaborative effort?

No. Simply because, if you look at the declaration that the original Occupy Wall St group has published after three weeks of discussions, it is one small page of rather ho-hum observations.

I don’t believe groups are good at thinking together, and certainly not at creating a strong narrative with a compelling voice.

There is a great deal of internal, unspoken work that goes into that.

In fact, I wrote the whole thing in about six hours, and posted it unedited (I gave it a quick edit a couple hours ago).

That sounds like a very short time, but in fact many months of thought went into – not the manifesto itself – but understanding all these apparently disparate fields and then finding a reason – the reason for which they exist and are relevant.

After that it was just a matter of grinding out a text while thinking about who I am addressing. Who needs to read this, and why, and most of all – if I am speaking of a human thing, then it must truly be human, it must truly speak to all but those who would deny it out of hate or strong preconceptions.

Whether I managed to do that or not (personally, I think it’s not exactly shining work), it couldn’t have been done as a group. Never ever.

But I am passionate about groups. In fact, I am working on a site where I want to revolutionize both group work and community building theory. http://www.verigalipsa.com it’s quite a mess right now but will evolve in the coming days

Where groups shine is in gathering information and making a million wrong observations, that can form a massive structure you can whittle away at.

One mind moves easily through the large forms of the world and the universe, but when it comes to details, many minds must do the job of melding the unstructured into structure, then that structure has to be refined and completed, transcended, if you will, from structure to usable understanding, by very few minds, or just one.

This is not an argument for individuality, but rather for intelligence. The higher the minds in the group, the quicker they will move, and the higher the structure they will create. But eventually, somewhere, someone, will have to grind the edge on the sword. And you can’t have 20 people grinding an edge, it’s a mess.

If you would like to send me a list of some of the grammar mistakes, I would be grateful for that.

Luca Oprea

lucaoprea a tt gmail .com

Regardless, there is opportunity in both the giving and the receiving. Do NOT pass it up!