In a thoroughly hyperconnected environment, behaviors are pervasively observed. If these behaviors are successful, they will be copied by others, who are also pervasively observed. The behavior itself hyperdistributes throughout the network. This is a behavioral analog to hyperintelligence: hypermimesis. The development of ‘SMS language’ is one example of hypermimesis; as terms are added to… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2011"
Matt Taibbi: “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
Interview, recalling some basic truths, via Democracy Now: “Nobody goes to jail,” writes Matt Taibbi in the new issue of Rolling Stone magazine. “This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed… Continue reading
FCForum Declaration: Sustainable Models for Creativity
The following was also endorsed by the P2P Foundation: Original via http://fcforum.net/sustainable-models-for-creativity/declaration Free/Libre Culture Forum Declaration [For details, see the extended version] We can no longer put off re-thinking the economic structures that have been producing, financing, and funding culture up until now. Many of the old models have become anachronistic and detrimental to civil… Continue reading
Details on the cyber revolt in Lybia and the role of the revolutionary media cells
Excerpted from a report from Al Jazeera, on the situation in Benghazi. Evan Hill: “The top-floor internet centre began operating on Tuesday, explains Sanalla, a dual British and Libyan citizen who has spent the past four years studying medicine at Benghazi’s Garyounis University. Ahmed Sheikh, a 42-year-old computer engineer who works in civil aviation, rigged… Continue reading
Dyndy.net: the future of money
Last fall in Amsterdam took place the second Economies of the Commons – Paying the cost of making things free – conference. In the panels they discussed the political economy of open content and its consequences for the cultural sector and analyzed critically the economies taking place in the “digital commons.. In that context Jaromil… Continue reading
Mark Pesce: When hyperdistribution comes after hyperconnectivity
This is the sharing instinct, caught up and amplified by hyperconnectivity, producing the capability to send something everywhere, instantaneously: hyperdistribution Excerpted from Mark Pesce: “What happens after we are all connected? For an answer to this, we must look back to the original human network, language. Our infinitely flexible linguistic capability allows us to put… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Insect Media, the anti-McLuhan book
Insect Media is an anti-McLuhan genealogy of media: how can we understand media not as extensions of the (hu)man, but as extensions of nature and animals? * Book: Insect Media. An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Jussi Parikka. University of Minnesota Press,2010 The publisher’s page states that Through close engagement with the pioneering work of… Continue reading
A conservative-progressive alliance around the protection of working families?
Excerpted from Claire Snyder-Hall in Tikkun : “What is their positive agenda? Most obviously, Christian conservatives are pro-family. While this term often stands in for “anti-gay,” when you look at some of the non-political evangelical websites, you start to see the positive vision they embrace. For example, consider the conservative women’s site, called truewoman.com. This… Continue reading
Mark Pesce: The Age of Hyperconnectivity
Excerpted from Mark Pesce: “How many people can any given person on Earth reach directly? Before the Urban Revolution that value had a strict upper bound in Dunbar’s Number. This number sets an functional limit on the troupe (tribe) size of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Human units larger than this fragment and bifurcate along lines of… Continue reading
Axiology – The Economics of Spaceship Earth
Fifty Island or Isla Cincuenta is a tale of economics by Francisco Ortega Martinez, who describes an island economy based on human values and a continuous re-distribution of money. The story, in two parts, tells us about the economic life of the island community and their experiment in finding a new way of living together…. Continue reading
After the Arab uprisings, what has changed for neoliberal Empire?
For much of the last 30 years, these elites have waged a relentless assault on the people they exploit. Trade unions have been decimated, real wages cut, public services privatised, public resources plundered. For many of these years during which “there was no alternative”, resistance in most places was either marginal or symbolic. In one… Continue reading
The root cause(s) of food price inflation
An August 2009 paper by Jayati Ghosh, professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, compared food staples traded on futures markets with staples that were not. She found that the price of food staples not traded on futures markets, such as millet, cassava and potatoes, rose… Continue reading
Throughout history, the use of media has been crucial for political and social struggles
Contribution 1: Steve Sherman Excerpted from Steve Sherman : “I think the general point that social media, and other forms of media, are trivial sideshows to the ‘real’ element of struggle is completely untenable and wrongheaded. In fact, I would go quite a bit farther than remarking that they are important, or that they facilitate… Continue reading
Selling out free labour: the case of the Huffington Post
Harsh words from Chris Hedges: “The sale of The Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million, and the tidy profit of reportedly at least several million dollars made by principal owner and founder Arianna Huffington, who was already rich, is emblematic of this new paradigm of American journalism. The Huffington Post, as Stephen Colbert pointed… Continue reading
The radical potential of nowtopian struggles
Republished from September 2010: Nowtopia is a term that attempts to describe the myriad efforts to reclaim and reinvent work against the logic of capital. Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid)… Continue reading
Manuel Castells on internet-led and facilitated change in the Arab World
The first part is excerpted from an interview of Manuel Castells for the Open University of Catalonia. In the second part, the internet blackout in Egypt is seen as a true tipping point in the revolution, it’s what drove people to the streets to protest what they saw as inacceptable. The third part is a… Continue reading