Our friend and colleague Athina Karatzogianni contributed a paper (4.9) on Russian hackers, various cyberconflicts, and media implicating them in the Climategate hack, which is part of an interesting issue of the journal Digital Icons: ————– Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media Issue 4: War, Conflict and Commemoration in the… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2010"
The New Digital Economy and Sustainable Urbanism
A contribution by Felipe Velasquez Palacio, creator of lapapaya.org: The worldwide social crisis has shown the weaknesses of a system that must be replaced with new initiatives and projects before trying to attack it. The proposal is based on trying to reunite the pieces of a fragmented society, before making deeper the wound, and via… Continue reading
The danger of the tethered internet
So, this is how it becomes possible to destroy the Internet, through infiltration and entrapment in a pattern familiar from the old frontier days of the Wild West. Corporations buy the most important patches of land and then control everything built on it as well as all traffic going through it. In this case, crucial… Continue reading
The great transition plan to take back control of the economy
Watch this video:
How Wikileaks shows the truth about our democracy
This is the most important editorial to appear so far on the Wikileaks affair, by John Naughton in the Guardian: John Naughton: “‘Never waste a good crisis” used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official… Continue reading
The weak points of the open internet: DNS and Cloud Storage
1. We often talk about the Internet as being the new “public square,” the place where we communicate, participate, argue, share, debate, learn, listen. But many of the key pieces of Internet infrastructure are privately owned. And these companies have no obligation – and sometimes clearly, little willingness – to protect our First Amendment rights…. Continue reading
Property, existential security, and abundance
A meditation on the nature of property by Andrew Robinson: “The reason there is resistance to ending property is that property has become connected to existential territory. This is also what is meant by “owning” something in Stirner. I suspect that people will always have existential territories, though they may be more mobile and open-ended… Continue reading
David Korten: what to do if Wall Street can’t be reformed?
Excellent interview via Peak Moment TV, one of the best video collections on the internet:
The anthropology of peer production (2): the Emergence of the Free-Goodness Model of Human Interaction
“Given no “invisible hand” of profit incentivizing individuals to contribute to online communities, nor any central governance coercing or motivating them, why then do people choose to upload, share, blog, help and cooperate in increasing numbers? A theory is needed to explain the socio–technical phenomenon, to explain why less–for–profit systems are flourishing. … The “rational”… Continue reading
Thomas Powers on the end of the closed world
Thomas Power’s video editorial on the significance of Wikileaks as symptom of the ‘end of the closed world’:
A cultural change in the world of design
Recently, a strange kind of cultural conflict is emerging in the world of design: on one side, there are designers that use to operate inside traditional production systems; on the other, there are new hybrid actors that try to redistribute the manufacture out of the institutionalized industrial process, thanks to techniques like 3d printing and… Continue reading
Preparing for the demise of the nation-state: what’s next?
Excerpted from Alternet via Carolyn Baker: John Goekler: 1. The Problem “Today, the nation state is clearly withering. But where Marx saw this as the logical result of a workers’ utopia and the perfection of humankind, it is precisely the failure to manifest that utopia and perfection that is both a primary driver, and a… Continue reading
Clay Shirky on the right balance between transparency rights and secrecy rights
Excerpted from Clay Shirky: “Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks. Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state…. Continue reading
The Transition Movement in the U.S.
One of the key roles of Transition that sets it apart from other efforts is a commitment to continually raise awareness about our collective predicament. We’re sometimes criticized for this. I find it very helpful that Gus Speth recounts that in The Death of Environmentalism the authors remind us that Martin Luther King, Jr., did… Continue reading
Towards quadriform societies
Networks can bring order to complex situations by providing platforms for the vast interdependencies, connectivity and emergent phenomena to express itself. Networks create opportunities for everyone to win and benefit from others’ succeeding. Everyone can have the effect of empowering others by encouraging their contributions, appreciating their sharing, and maintaining the commons. The collective abundance… Continue reading
Alternative donations to Wikileaks via Flattr + Operation Payback video
Via Forbes: “Peter Sunde, the co-founder of torrent site Pirate Bay and fellow champion of free information recently reminded his Twitter followers that they could still donate money to WikiLeaks through his micro-donation site, known as Flattr. How it works: users put a minimum of 2 euros into a Flattr account each month and can… Continue reading