“Thanks to your spontaneous generosity, we raised over $80.000 on behalf of Robert Anton Wilson in less than a week. This means he can be taken care of by family at home or, if need be, in a managed care facility for over six months.

If at the end of six or eight months all of this money has been spent on care – and Bob has chosen to carry on living – we’ll see about what other financial solutions might be possible, including another plea to his reading public.

But for the time being, save your pennies and pence, give yourselves and each other a hearty “job well done,” and get back to the good work of helping people think smarter and act kinder.”

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The post Update on Robert Anton Wilson’s condition, according Douglas Rushkoff appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From http://www.newscientist.com/Â :

“An analysis of how cells in a tumour cooperate has provided a unique insight into the evolution of cancer, and may lead to new treatments.

It makes use of “game theory” – the mix of mathematics and economics theory that has been invaluable in understanding how cooperation can evolve in animal societies, even when individuals are selfish.

Robert Axelrod, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, US, a leader in applying game theory to evolutionary biology, has now turned his attention to cancer.

Since every cancer cell within a tumour is different, with different mutations and needs, each of these cells can be thought of as a “playerâ€? in a game theory sense, Axelrod says.”

(…)

““Itâ€s well established that tumour cells grow by diffusing growth factors into the neighbouring tissue,â€? says Axelrod. Some cells lack the “full deckâ€? of mutations necessary to produce all the growth factors, overcome host defences and become independently malignant.

But cells can aid each other by complementing the missing growth signals. A cell that promotes blood vessel growth to the tumour will also benefit other pre-cancerous cells.

“Itâ€s Adam Smithâ€s old idea that if people cooperate itâ€s easier to get the job done,â€? Axelrod says, referring to the 18^th-century philosopher. “Cooperation is thought of as a good thing, and cancer bad. It may be the reason why no one has thought of putting the two together.â€?”

follow up : http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9858-do-cancer-cells-cooperate-with-each-other.html

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(source: http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/04/zizek-on-tech-bloom.html)

1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.

2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.

3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.

4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.

5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact

6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication

7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education

8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration

9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend

10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
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The post Olivier Malnuit’s ten commandments for the liberal communist appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From : http://www.memetherapy.net/10/jamais-cascio-on-technology-and-politics/Â

MT: Do you think political blogging/smart mobs are poised to start having a serious impact on the decisions being made by elected officials in the western democracies? If not what do you think needs to happen first?

I think theyâ€re already having an impact, but not necessarily in the ways that either mainline bloggers or traditional power brokers might conceive. For bloggers, the blog/smart mob phenomenon is all about giving voice to the people; for traditional opinion-makers, the phenomenon is all about replacing reasoned debate with unwashed rancor.

I see the situation a bit differently. In the past, political decisions emerged from a “consensus reality” shaped by lobbyists, newspaper pundits, leading journalists, a politicianâ€s staff, and of course other politicians. This “consensus reality” was the story these folks told each other about how the world works, what constituted a fact, what was worth knowing about and what could be ignored; the citizenry consumed that vision of the world, and accepted it — few people who disagreed with the consensus model had much of a chance of reaching more than a few dozen others.

follow-up:Â http://www.memetherapy.net/10/jamais-cascio-on-technology-and-politics/Â

The post Jamais Cascio interviewed on MemeTherapy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Teams of robots that can remotely tap into each other’s sensors and computers in order to perform tricky tasks have been developed by researchers in Sweden. The robots can, for example, negotiate their way past awkward obstacles by relaying different viewpoints to one another.

Robert Lundh, who developed the bots at Örebro University, says cooperative behaviour is normally rigidly pre-programmed into robots. “We wanted to have the robots plan for themselves how to draw on their capabilities and those of others,” he told New Scientist.

Lundh’s robots decide whether another nearby robot may be able to help with a specific task. In one experiment two round robots, each 45 centimetres in diameter and 25 cm tall, teamed up to negotiate their way through a doorway. They were forced to cooperate because each robot’s vision system had been limited so that it could not see enough of the doorway to be certain of getting through without hitting the sides.”

(More …Â )

The post Collaborative robots appeared first on P2P Foundation.

follow-up:Â http://www.edery.org/2006/06/user-generated-content-the-list/

The post User generated content and gaming appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/07/posthuman-terrains.htmlÂ

“I have long thought that when Aristotle defined “man” [sic] as the “political animal,” this formulation constituted a fledgling kind of cyborg manifesto written many centuries before Donna Haraway’s own. Aristotle’s definition amounts to the claim that human animals become different in their “essential naturesâ€? when they live together in cities. (…)”

 “The “post-humanâ€? is not one kind of prostheticized person, nor is “post-humanismâ€? a singular response to a particular kind of prostheticized personhood, whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, post-“disabilityâ€? different-enablement prostheses, open source biopunks and leapfroggers and copyfighters, or what have you — nor certainly the more fantastic identifications with robots or artificial intelligences or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanismâ€? is discussed as a topic.

Such identifications (and, crucially, their attendant disidentifications) are moralistic in form, not ethical. And whatever else we may say of it, the ongoing and upcoming crises of humanism — no less than its emergence with the appearance of the political/rational animal — are profoundly ethical: “Post-humanism,” properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of (“post” in the sense of “after”) or in resistance to (“post” in the sense of “over”) that confrontation are themselves ethical terms. One might even discern in them the best impulses that have animated humanism in its emancipatory aspect.”

 There is also an interview of Dale Carrico here, where he explains the difference between a “transhumanist” and a “technoprogressive”.

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The post Dale Carrico on transhumanism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a “darknet”. The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

“There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,” says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. “If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void.” “

You may find the whole press release here.

UPDATE:
Wired have a great article on the Pirat Party here

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“A demand for more deliberative development is exactly as central to my own version of technoprogressive politics as is the demand for sustainable development.

That phrase, “deliberative development,” may conjure up the facile and fussy image of “progress” by plan or by committee meeting, a vision of a domesticated development smoothed, controlled, and constrained by experts. But the fact is that technodevelopmental social struggle releases inherently unpredictable forces into the world. It is ineradicably dynamic, interminably contentious, ideally open… So just what do I mean by deliberative development after all?

For one thing, deliberative development would indeed involve highly transparent, generously funded processes of consensus science coupled with a scientifically literate professional policy apparatus to assess risks, costs, and benefits and advise our elected representatives as they struggle to do their job to regulate, study, and fund research and development to promote general welfare. In practice, this would inevitably amount to proliferating committee meetings and inspection tours and licensing standards and granting bodies and blue-ribbon panels and published conference proceedings and impact studies and public hearings and all the rest. I happen to like nice social workers and dedicated public servants and credentialized do-gooders as a type, and I pine for a civilization in which their indispensable work is generally more appreciated than demeaned, and so this is not a vision that inspires in me the dread and disgust that will have overcome many a (self-described) “rugged” “no-nonsense” critic at this point in my account.”

one may also consult this entry of the P2P encyclopedia:http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Deliberative_Development

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“Stretching from 3000 BC to today, this book investigates how military cultures and the evolution of games have been closely linked, from video gamingâ€s ancestors like chess and go, to the popularization of the 19th century Kriegspiel, to the development of computers for use during World War II and the invention of video games by Defense Department-funded scientists. Readers will discover how war fantasies played out from the early arcade years to the rise of online gaming, how the military began working with companies like Nintendo, Atari and Microsoft to produce training devices, and how todayâ€s generals hope to sell recruitment to a new generation of joystick warriors. ” (book’s desription from amazon)

The book has a website, aptly named: http://www.fromsuntzutoxbox.com/

There is also a blog : http://warandvideogames.typepad.com/blog/

 Those interested in this important topic may also consult:

http://www.defencegaming.org/

And the Moves Institute website:

http://www.nps.navy.mil/moves/

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