The founder of this Revolutionary Initiative, Ferial Puren, puts it this way “The world as we know it has progressively adopted a Consumerist, Capitalistic, Individualistic worldview that has impacted the entire ecosystem by creating a social, environmental and spiritual divide. Our society, you, me and our governments at large recognize and feel the repercussions of these divides. This feeling is reflected in the fact that 9 out of every 10 people on this planet agree that our world is not an ideal world and 80% of us don’t like what we do and how we express ourselves in this world, which makes us unhappy, unfulfilled and dissatisfied.”

Ignite TV will adopt the STOP, RESET, GO concept throughout it’s reporting to inspire an awakening and re-connect us to each other and our eco-system so that we can find solutions to our greatest challenges and co-create the world we want.

About STOP, RESET & GO Collective…

Visit:https://stopresetgo.org/

Stop Reset Go is a growing collective of change agents who seek your support to co-create an open, digital framework for the commons, enabling citizens, entrepreneurs, activists, communities and distributed initiatives around the world to come out of their silos, converge and effectively share resources to build the future of humanity.

About Ignite life…

Visit: http://ignitelife.info/

Ignite life aims to inspire an awakening within human beings to a greater consciousness to recognize the impact of these 3 major societal divides.  We do this in an effort to play our role well in addressing the root causes of our challenges and being part of creating a circular economy that supports and nurtures happy, successful life.

How to get involved?

To achieve their collective goals, a crowdfunding campaign has been organized to bring together the collaborators and co-creators from around the world to support this movement of Conscious Awakening, and together help build the tools for a better society.

So, for as little as $1 you could get in on the action, and or by sharing this initiative with your friends, family and other change makers. The Ignite TV crew is also giving you some very creative rewards for your solidarity, such as cool STOP RESET GO Merch, On-Screen Credits, TV face time, a democratic vote on any major decisions about the Channel – no matter how much or little you contribute, a chance to be in the centre of the action at the launch event in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2017 but most importantly a rare opportunity to join your fellow humans in co-creating the future.

So, if you wish to be part of inspiring change, head over to the Ignite TV Campaign Page and show your support: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/co-create-worlds-first-viewer-owned-tv-channel

And OR help spread the word by pledging your support on: https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/60417-bring-ignite-tv-to-the-world

Video Link: http://player.vimeo.com/video/229091539

Contact Information

Ferial Puren

skype: Ferial Puren

http://ignitelife.info

http://ignitelifeshop.info

www.stopresetgo.org

The post Support Ignite TV! A Commons-oriented viewer-owned station appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our excerpt:

“No matter how promising the design of a new system might be, it would be unreasonable to expect that a nation would abruptly drop an existing system in favor of a new one. Nevertheless, a viable, even attractive strategy exists by which new systems could be successfully researched, developed, tested, and implemented. I call it engage global, test local, spread viral.

Engage global means to engage the global academic community and technical sector, in partnership with other segments of society, in a well-defined R&D program aimed at computer simulation and scientific field testing of new systems and benchmarking of results. In this way, the most profound insights of science can be brought into play.

Test local means to scientifically test new designs at the local (e.g., city or community) level, using volunteers (individuals, businesses, non-profits, etc.) organized as civic clubs. This approach allows testing by relatively small teams, at relatively low cost and risk, in coexistence with existing systems, and without legislative action.

Spread viral means that if a system shows clear benefits in one location (elimination of poverty, for example, more meaningful jobs, or less crime) it would likely spread horizontally, even virally, to other local areas. This approach would create a global network of communities and cities that cooperate in trade, education, the setup of new systems, and other matters. Over time, its impact on all segments of society would grow.

Cities, big and small, are the legs upon which all national systems rest. Already cities and their communities are hubs for innovation. With some further encouragement and support, and the right tools and programs, they could become more resilient and robust, and bigger heroes in the coming great transition.”

Photo by Occupy Global

The post The Triarchy of Cosmo-Localization: Engage Global, Test Local, Spread Viral appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“What you can actually see is that certain governments have mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes. Right? And they are building what I call the Spinternet. The combination of spin, on the one hand, and the Internet on the other. So governments from Russia to China to Iran are actually hiring, training and paying bloggers in order to leave ideological comments and create a lot of ideological blog posts to comment on sensitive political issues. Right?

4:27

So you may wonder, why on Earth are they doing it? Why are they engaging with cyberspace? Well my theory is that it’s happening because censorship actually is less effective than you think it is in many of those places. The moment you put something critical in a blog, even if you manage to ban it immediately, it will still spread around thousands and thousands of other blogs. So the more you block it, the more it emboldens people to actually avoid the censorship and thus win in this cat-and-mouse game. So the only way to control this message is actually to try to spin it and accuse anyone who has written something critical of being, for example, a CIA agent.

5:11

And, again, this is happening quite often. Just to give you an example of how it works in China, for example. There was a big case in February 2009 called “Elude the Cat.” And for those of you who didn’t know, I’ll just give a little summary. So what happened is that a 24-year-old man, a Chinese man, died in prison custody. And police said that it happened because he was playing hide and seek, which is “elude the cat” in Chinese slang, with other inmates and hit his head against the wall, which was not an explanation which sat well with many Chinese bloggers.

5:53

So they immediately began posting a lot of critical comments. In fact, QQ.com, which is a popular Chinese website, had 35,000 comments on this issue within hours. But then authorities did something very smart. Instead of trying to purge these comments, they instead went and reached out to the bloggers. And they basically said, “Look guys. We’d like you to become netizen investigators.” So 500 people applied, and four were selected to actually go and tour the facility in question, and thus inspect it and then blog about it. Within days the entire incident was forgotten, which would have never happened if they simply tried to block the content. People would keep talking about it for weeks.

6:39

And this actually fits with another interesting theory about what’s happening in authoritarian states and in their cyberspace. This is what political scientists call authoritarian deliberation, and it happens when governments are actually reaching out to their critics and letting them engage with each other online. We tend to think that somehow this is going to harm these dictatorships, but in many cases it only strengthens them. And you may wonder why. I’ll just give you a very short list of reasons why authoritarian deliberation may actually help the dictators.

7:15

And first it’s quite simple. Most of them operate in a complete information vacuum. They don’t really have the data they need in order to identify emerging threats facing the regime. So encouraging people to actually go online and share information and data on blogs and wikis is great because otherwise, low level apparatchiks and bureaucrats will continue concealing what’s actually happening in the country, right? So from this perspective, having blogs and wikis produce knowledge has been great.

7:44

Secondly, involving public in any decision making is also great because it helps you to share the blame for the policies which eventually fail. Because they say, “Well look, we asked you, we consulted you, you voted on it. You put it on the front page of your blog. Well, great. You are the one who is to blame.”

8:02

And finally, the purpose of any authoritarian deliberation efforts is usually to increase the legitimacy of the regimes, both at home and abroad. So inviting people to all sorts of public forums, having them participate in decision making, it’s actually great. Because what happens is that then you can actually point to this initiative and say, “Well, we are having a democracy. We are having a forum.”

8:25

Just to give you an example, one of the Russian regions, for example, now involves its citizens in planning its strategy up until year 2020. Right? So they can go online and contribute ideas on what that region would look like by the year 2020. I mean, anyone who has been to Russia would know that there was no planning in Russia for the next month. So having people involved in planning for 2020 is not necessarily going to change anything, because the dictators are still the ones who control the agenda.

8:55

Just to give you an example from Iran, we all heard about the Twitter revolution that happened there, but if you look close enough, you’ll actually see that many of the networks and blogs and Twitter and Facebook were actually operational. They may have become slower, but the activists could still access it and actually argue that having access to them is actually great for many authoritarian states. And it’s great simply because they can gather open source intelligence.

9:24

In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. Now you actually know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. I mean KGB, and not just KGB, used to torture in order to actually get this data. Now it’s all available online. (Laughter)”

See the video here:

Photo by F.d.W.

The post How the internet is used for “Authoritarian Deliberation”. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Learn more at thelamp.org. There you’ll find MediaBreaker, a free online program that enables students to deconstruct, re-edit, and remix the messages in current advertising campaigns.

Visit our resources page here on teamhuman.fm for a quick connection to the many valuable media breaking tools the LAMP offers.

The post Team Human 9: DC Vito on Media Literacy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Playing for Team Human today is Professor Richard Maxwell. Richard Maxwell is a political economist of media. His research begins at the intersection of politics and economics to analyze the global media, their social and cultural impact, and the policies that regulate their reach and operations. Richard has published on a wide array of media topics. Recent work includes The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media (Editor) Media and the Ecological Crisis (co-editor) and Greening the Media with Toby Miller. In this episode of Team Human, Professor Maxwell provides an eye opening account of the environmental damage caused by media technology, the myth of a “Post Industrial” society, and what we must do create a world sustainable for people.

Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s regular column, “Greening the Media” can be read here at Psychology Today.

Inspired by this episode to get involved? Visit our ever-expanding resources page to learn how to transform your own technology consumption along with ways to exert pressure on the big polluters and labor exploiters across the globe.

Cross-posted from TeamHuman.fm

The post Team Human 2: Richard Maxwell on Greening the Media appeared first on P2P Foundation.

How about art?

Third-party corporate platforms for artists are ubiquitous – from Soundcloud to Deviant Art to Create Space. Artist cooperatives have been in existence for over a century.  Combining the two into an open source publishing platform seems inevitable.

But rather than a platform, Lynne Desilva Johnson is creating The Operating System.

Extracted from https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/yes-and-the-operating-system-2-0#/

We’re an arts and education organization that’s taken a page from the tech community’s Open Source and Peer to Peer initiatives, approaching the act of publishing with the belief that the documentation, distribution, and archiving of creative practice (understood broadly) can be revolutionary for individuals and organizations — and indeed for our society as a whole.

In addition to running workshops, facilitating conversations and panels, curating exhibits, and gathering free, open learning resources from all over the world, we also publish online and off: we’re best known for the small press that operates under The Operating System umbrella, which has published over 20 books to date (and which will publish 20 more in the next 18 months).

We facilitate many of these books from their onset, working closely with collaborators from a wide range of disciplines, backgrounds, and countries. The ultimate goal, though, is to cross pollinate not only between different disciplines within the arts but also within different industries, in the service of peer to peer learning both immediately and in the future, via the development of open source / archival materials.

http://www.theoperatingsystem.org/mission/

The name “THE OPERATING SYSTEM” is meant to speak to an understanding of the self as a constantly evolving organism, which just like any other system needs to learn to adapt if it is to survive. Just like your computer, you need to be “updating your software” frequently, as your patterns and habits no longer serve you.

http://www.wavecomposition.com/article/issue-11/an-interview-with-lynne-desilva-johnson/

I learned a big lesson about modeling, which is something that entrepreneurs often talk about: I realized that it would be really helpful to have a model of something I could do within my means that could serve as an example of the type of things that we could make, the type of things that could be possible in new ways, before really starting to move into the big ideas, because developing awareness of these models – and awareness of my approach (and of me, the fact of my existence, to these people that didn’t know me from Adam)—would start to build trust.

While we might be known best for our publishing projects, in fact we are a hub for a wide range of programs which seek to cross pollinate not only between different disciplines within the arts but also within different industries, in the service of peer to peer learning both immediately and in the future, via the development of open source / archival materials; in addition our own process has been transparent from day one, seeking to model possibility for others rather than competing with them.

While we’ve already published 20+ books and this campaign will support the publication of the next 20 (already slated for release through 1/2018), the impact of this funding is far greater: for our mission of facilitated creative documentation and archiving is achieved not only through our books but also through outreach, education and community programs on the ground, as well as via the continued development of online and multimedia resources.

http://www.theoperatingsystem.org/submissions/

OPEN SUBMISSIONS: WEB

The Operating System is always in the process of resilient reinvention. This platform was designed as a hub for forwardthinking, proactive creators — individuals and groups who wish to become more than the sum of our parts, together.

Current webcontent streams of production derive from all corners of The OS’s geographic and virtual community landscape – here,  collaborators, partners and contributors have an always available opportunity for online publication and dialogue, whether in a sustained fashion or in a single post.

This online home offers exclusive online content from artists, filmmakers, musicians, performers, and writers, as well as in depth profiles of the Awesome Creators who make up our global community, across a wide range of disciplines. This content aims to explore the processes that inform and facilitate creative production, valuating and documenting models for further dialogue, exploration, and co-collaborative discovery on and offline. It is meant as an archive, not a newspaper – this content remains searchable and viable for personal and public use from its inception, and it is hoped that it can become a teaching tool both for institutional use and autodidacts alike.

The post Project Of The Day: The Operating System appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Most of us thought digital technology would connect the whole world in new ways. The Internet was supposed to break down those last boundaries between what are essentially synthetic nation states and herald a new, global community of peers.

National governments were considered extinct. Internet evangelist (and Grateful Dead lyricist) John Barlow dismissed them in his Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace 20 years ago: “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”

But the Internet age has actually heralded the opposite result. We are not advancing toward some new global society, but instead retreating back to nationalism. Instead of moving toward a colors of Benetton racial intermingling, we find many yearning for a fictional past when people like to think our races were distinct, and all was well.

Welcome to the digital media environment. It is not a continuation of television environment that preceded it, but an entirely distinct landscape for human society, which engenders very different attitudes and behaviors.

A media environment is really just the kind of culture engendered by a particular medium. The invention of text encouraged written history, contracts, the Bible, and monotheism. The clock tower in medieval Europe led to hourly wages and the time-is-money ethos of the industrial age. Different media environments encourage us to play different roles and to see, think, or act in particular ways.

The television era was about globalism, international cooperation, and the open society. TV let people see for the first time what was happening in other places, often live, as it happened. We watched the Olympics, together, by satellite. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Even 9-11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event.

Television connected us all and broke down national boundaries. Whether it was the British Beatles playing on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York or the California beach bodies of Baywatch broadcast in Pakistan, television images penetrated national divisions. I interviewed Nelson Mandela in 1994, and he told me that MTV and CNN had more to do with ending the divisions of apartheid than any other force.

But today’s digital media environment is different. At the height of his media era, a telegenic Ronald Reagan could broadcast a speech in front of the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin and demand that Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Today’s ultimate digi-genic candidate Donald Trump demands that we build a wall to protect us from Mexicans.

This is because the primary bias of the digital media environment is for distinction. Analog media such as radio and television were continuous, like the sound on a vinyl record. Digital media, by contrast, are made up of many discrete samples. Likewise, digital networks break up our messages into tiny packets, and reassemble them on the other end. Computer programs all boil down to a series of 1’s and 0’s, on or off.

This logic trickles up to the platforms and apps we use. Everything is a choice—from font size to the place on a “snap-to” grid. It’s either 12 point or 13 point, positioned here or there. Did you send the email or not? There are no in-betweens.

So it’s no wonder that a society functioning on these platforms would tend toward similarly discrete formulations. Like or unlike? Black or white? Rich or poor? Agree or disagree? In a self-reinforcing feedback loop, each choice we make is noticed and acted upon by the algorithms personalizing our news feeds, further isolating each one of us in our own ideological filter bubble. Not one of the thousands of people who show up in my own Twitter feed support Brexit or Trump. For those supporters, I am sure the reverse is true. The Internet helps us take sides.

This is very different from the television environment, which engendered a “big blue marble” melting pot, hands-across-the-world, International Space Station, cooperative internationalism—well-funded by globalist foundations from Rockefeller and Ford to Soros and Clinton (who are both still espousing the transnational values of a television world).

We are flummoxed by today’s nationalist, regressively anti-global sentiments only because we are interpreting politics through that now-obsolete television screen. The first protests of the digital media landscape, such as those against the World Trade Organization in Seattle made no sense to the network news. They seemed to be an incoherent amalgamation of disparate causes: environmentalists, labor activists, and even anti-Zionists.

What unified them, however—more than their ability to organize collectively on the Internet—was their shared anti-globalism. The WTO represented the peak of global cohesion, at least as orchestrated by the world’s biggest corporations. The protesters had come to believe that the only entities capable of acting on the global level were ones too big for human beings to control.

Those protests were followed by Arab Spring, often misinterpreted as a global movement, when it was really more of a series of nationalist revivals. These were not young people demanding to be part of a world community of revolutionaries. These were local revolutions, with clearly defined boundaries.

The breakdown of European cohesion can be understood the same way. The European Union is a product of the television environment: open trade, one currency, free flow of people across boundaries, and the reduction of national identities to mere soccer teams. (That goes a long way to explaining the rise of hooliganism over the past few decades.) The transition to a digital media environment is making people a whole lot less tolerant of this dissolution of boundaries. Am I Croatian or Serbian? Kurd or Sunni? Greek or European? American or Mexican?

But if that newfound need for discrete identity were the entirety of the dynamic, things shouldn’t have gotten quite as jingoistic or xenophobic. No. There’s something else fueling Trump’s backward-looking “Make America Great Again,” and the Brexiters’ “Take Back Control.” It’s the other main bias of digital media: memory.

Memory is what computers were invented for in the first place. In 1945 when Vannevar Bush imagined the “Memex” on which computers were based, he described it as a digital filing cabinet. And even though they can now accomplish much more than data retrieval, everything computers do—all of their functions—simply involve moving things from one part of their memory to another. RAM and ROM are just kinds of memory.

Meanwhile, as Wikileaks, Google, Ed Snowden, and the NSA continually remind us, everything we do online is stored in memory. Whatever you said or did on Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, or Twitter is in an archive, timeline, or server somewhere, waiting to be retrieved by someone.

So when we combine these two biases—boundaries and memories—we get Brexiters justifying isolation as a confirmation of distinctly British values and the return to a nationalist era, when foreigners and other non-whites knew their place. Trump’s followers, likewise, recall a clearly redlined past when being white and American meant enjoying a safe neighborhood, a sense of superiority, and guaranteed place in the middle class. Immigrants were fellow Irish and Italians—not foreigners, refugees, or terrorists leaking illegally across permeable national boundaries.

To be sure, globalism has had some genuinely devastating effects on many of those who are now pushing back. Wealth disparity is at an all-time high, as the mitigating effects of local and national economic activity is dwarfed by that of global trade and transnational banks. But the way people are responding to this pressure, so far anyway, is strictly digital in spirit.

In some sense, those of us who want to preserve the one-world vision of the TV media environment are the ones who must stop looking back. If we’re going to promote connection, tolerance, and progressive internationalism, we’ll have to do it in a way that’s more consonant with the digital media environment in which we are actually living.

Cross-posted from Fast Co-Exist

Photo by Shakespearesmonkey

The post The New Nationalism is a Media Environment appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Rushkoff gave us permission to reprint his always fascinating email updates on the P2P blog, if you’d like to join his list, please do so here. The following text has also been published at digitaltrends.com so if, as he says, you want to “read a prettier version with video”, visit this link.

Digital culture seems up in arms about the ways the new Steve Jobs movie diverges from factual history. Unlike the film, nothing ever failed in an Apple demo, Jobs didn’t get into fights with people before going on stage, Wozniak never said any of the things his character does in the movie, and engineers simply don’t work and speak the way they do in the movie.

For people who knew Jobs or Apple well – or have even read Walter Isaacson’s book – the poetic license taken by the film feels like an inaccuracy being entered into the historical record. In that sense, it’s worse than a time-travel inconsistency in the Star Trek universe.

But is that really why people are so disturbed? Biopics have always taken liberties with real lives of their subjects; the dismay over this fictional take on the Jobs legend rivals the hoopla over a lustful Jesus in Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ. Something else is going on: We’re dissatisfied with how movies work, because digital media has rendered them – or at least the way they tell stories — obsolete.
Bedtime tales

Aaron Sorkin is probably our best living cinematic storyteller. In full disclosure, I grew up with the guy, directed him in high school musicals like Pippin and Charlie Brown, and sat next to him in the American History class where he got the idea for A Few Good Men. I really do love him and respect his work.

But there’s something about his writing that has always struck me as, well, almost too perfectly theatrical. The stories in his TV shows and movies are impeccably engineered to set up conflicts that conspire to bring out the precise inner flaws of each character involved. Superhuman dialogue – everyone has the perfect thing to say in every scene – increases the stakes until we reach an emotionally cathartic resolution that is both unexpected yet – in retrospect – inevitable. Sorkin is today’s master of Aristotelian narrative, that beginning, middle, and ending in which a character and his or her entire world descend into chaos then just come together, make absolute sense, and make us cry. It’s why we love such stories. Or did.

Because the real world just isn’t tidy like that. Conflicts don’t resolve; they linger and fester. Like terrorism or global warming. In real life there’s almost never a sigh of ultimate relief. The cathartic self-knowledge of the sort depicted at the end of every perfect drama doesn’t even happen in the shrink’s office, much less the night before a trial (A Few Good Men), an election (An American President) or an iPhone demo.

At best, good drama of this sort is escapist. It gives us a way to see life the way we’d like it to be: Justice prevails, evildoers get their comeuppance, and honor is rewarded. Sorkin shows like The West Wing or The Newsroom succeed not because they show us what those environments are really like, but because they show us what they should be like. In stark contrast to the calamity defining George W’s tenure, we get President Martin Sheen on a heroic journey on par with Shakespeare’s Henry V. While the ratings-driven newsmedia boggles the Gulf War and misreports elections in progress, The Newsroom was an homage to journalistic ethics and integrity trumping ratings and profit.

But these worlds must be depicted this way in order for them to serve as the perfect engines for heroic drama of a very particular type. They are shot in a photorealistic style, but they are backdrops for the classical well-made play.

As Sorkin recently told Wired, he is not really a screenwriter, but a “playwright who pretends to be a screenwriter.” What he may not fully realize is that this makes him not just one, but two full media revolutions behind the times. We are living in a digital-media universe, where the rules of drama described by Aristotle 2,000 years ago no longer hold.

For decades now, interactive media devices, from the remote control and the VCR to Netflix and the DVR have changed our relationship to filmed stories. If we don’t believe something, we can change the channel. If we don’t understand something, we can pause and go back. We have a freedom we couldn’t enjoy as live broadcast viewers – much less as movie theater goers. We don’t have to sit through the rising tension, the plot twists, or the frustration of the protagonist unless we want to. We can watch three shows at once, cutting back and forth between them as TV operators rather than as mere TV viewers. We watch movies on YouTube, less as immersed audience members than as distanced critics.

That’s why traditional sitcoms and hour dramas with weekly happy endings gave way to stories broken up into lots of little pieces, or serialized over years. The Simpsons was written for the channel surfer. We don’t care about whether Homer gets out of the nuclear power plant before it blows up; we are watching the show scene by scene, trying to recognize which commercial, movie, or other show is being satirized. It’s like Mystery Science Theater 3000, where the satisfaction comes not from getting to the end, but getting the reference. The implied hyperlink.

Meanwhile, premium channels like HBO are filled with shows that don’t ever really resolve. We don’t watch Game of Thrones to see who is going to win the war, but to watch the game in progress. Look at the opening titles over a map of the seven kingdoms: It may as well be a fantasy role-playing game or World of Warcraft. The object of such a game isn’t to win, because that ends the play. It’s to keep the game going.

Likewise, our real lives in the digital era have become less traditionally structured. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman tells us to dispense with the notion of a career, and to think in terms of 18-month gigs and a constant search for new opportunities. You never get to the promised land. There is no end. The only ones still left hawking a story with an ending are VCs pushing the millionaire-minting “exit potential” of their startups – and, thanks to Mike Judge’s show Silicon Valley, most of us are coming to realize what malarkey that turns out to be, too.

The truth is, we have outgrown the kinds of bedtime stories that have placated us and assuaged our anxiety for centuries. We don’t need the contrived resolution of Mark Zuckerberg sending a friend request to his ex-girlfriend at the end of Social Network, or the emotional catharsis of Steve Jobs forging a relationship with the daughter he neglected.

Besides, our digital technologies and the sensibilities they foster have made us less likely to want to watch someone else’s story than to experience our own in a video game. When we do turn to media today, it is less likely in order to hear some story than to check a fact. In this age of transparency, we want to know what’s really going on.

To Sorkin’s credit, it was the villain in his first great play who argued that we “can’t handle the truth.” Reality, Jack Nicholson’s character explained, is just too messy, too dirty, too violent for us innocents to behold. We require pretty stories.

But as members of the digital generation, we have learned to interact with the worlds behind the screen. We have become the masters of the most powerful technologies humankind has ever known, and eaten from the tree of the knowledge. Indeed, we have bitten into the apple.

And for that, we have the real Steve Jobs to thank.

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/how-technology-has-dulled-our-taste-for-tall-tales/#ixzz3qXPfK1zk

The post Douglas Rushkoff: “You Can’t Handle The Truth” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

image by argazkiak.org

As usual, Spanish politicians react with fear and repression when confronted with the effects of new ways of sharing information: they are preparing a new law (to go with the ones restricting crowdfunding and services like AirBnB and Uber) to tax those who wish to share information freely. The pattern appears to be: existing industry feels threatened, lobbies government, government passes legislation to hamper innovations. The individual merits of each new service can be argued but anyone who knows the way the conservative government in Madrid generally thinks and reacts, we can be pretty sure they do not understand the milieu in which they are attempting to act.

“…all Spanish newspapers are haemorrhaging readers, consistently report revenue losses to the tune of millions of euros a year and many are already technically bankrupt.”
“…The idea that law will compensate for these losses is laughable. What isn’t so funny is the chilling effect on the free dissemination of information it will have.”

Read more…

The post Spanish lawmakers to kill CC licensing appeared first on P2P Foundation.