From the editorial:

“The interdisciplinary research program ADAM (Distributed Architectures and Multimedia Applications, adam.hypotheses.org), conducted from 2010 to 2014 and funded by the French National Agency for Research (Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR), has explored the technical, political, social, socio-cultural and legal implications of distributed network architectures. While actually covering, in practice, a large variety of technical arrangements and topologies, this term broadly indicates a type of network bearing several features: a network made of multiple computing units, seeking to achieve its objectives by sharing resources and tasks, able to tolerate the failure of individual nodes and thus not subjected to single points of failure, and able to scale flexibly. Beyond this simplified operational definition, the choice, by developers and engineers of Internet-based services, to develop these architectures instead of more centralized models has several implications for the daily use of online services and for the rights of Internet users.

The final symposium of the ADAM project, open to disciplines as varied as science and technology studies, information and communication sciences, economics, law and network engineering, took place at the end of 2014, and addressed these implications in terms of a central issue. With the increasingly evident centralization of the Internet and the surveillance excesses it appears to foster, what are the place and the role of the (re-)decentralization of networks’ technical architectures? What is the place for user autonomy and empowerment at a time when infringements upon privacy and pervasive surveillance practices are often embedded in network architectures? Are distribution and decentralization of network architectures the ways, as Philippe Aigrain (2010) suggested, to “reclaim” Internet services — instruments of ‘technical governance’ able to reconnect with the original organization of cyberspace?

Papers presented at the symposium, of which this special issue presents a “revised and improved” selection, have explored decentralized network architectures in political, social, and legal terms as well as technical. While this exploration has drawn from different methodological and epistemological perspectives, this introduction points out some of the ‘transversal’ dynamics and issues they highlight. Before getting on to that, though, we wish to briefly touch upon the genesis of our project — that has finally led to the symposium — what motivated us to investigate distributed architectures through socio-economic, political and legal lenses, and how we have seen these objects evolve within the frame of the project and beyond.”

Contents of the special issue:

“Reclaiming the Internet” with distributed architectures: An introduction by Francesca Musiani, Cécile Méadel

The decentralization of knowledge: How Carnap and Heidegger influenced the Web by Harry Halpin, Alexandre Monnin

Monuments of cyberspace: Designing the Internet beyond the network framework by Paris Chrysos

Blockchain technology as a regulatory technology: From code is law to law is code by Primavera De Filippi, Samer Hassan

Peer to party: Occupy the law by Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay

Law encoded: Towards a free speech policy model based on decentralized architectures by Argyro P. Karanasiou

Alternative rules for alternative networks? Tort law meets wireless community networks by Federica Giovanella

Local networks for local interactions: Four reasons why and a way forward by Panayotis Antoniadis

Cosmopolitical composition of distributed architectures by Dominique Boullier.

Photo by Kevin Doncaster

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From the Introduction: “The hopes of past generations of hackers weigh like a delirium on the brains of the newbies. Back in the days when Bulletin Board Systems metamorphosed into the Internet, the world’s digital communications networks – hitherto confined to military, corporate and elite academic institutions – were at grasping reach of ordinary individuals. To declare the independence of the Internet from nation states and the corporate world seemed like no more than stating the bare facts. Even encrypted communication – the brainchild of military research – had leaked into the public’s hands and had become a tool wielded against state power. Collectives of all stripes could make use of the new possibilities offered by the Web to bypass traditional media, broadcast their own voice and assemble in new ways in this new public sphere. For some time, at least, the Internet as a whole embodied ‘alternativeness’. ”

Contents of JOPP# 9

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction

• Alt. vs. Ctrl.: Editorial notes for the JoPP issue on Alternative Internets – Félix Tréguer, Panayotis Antoniadis and Johan Söderberg

Peer Reviewed Academic Papers

• In Defense of the Digital Craftsperson – James Losey and Sascha D. Meinrath
• Hacktivism, Infrastructures and Legal Frameworks in Community Networks: The Italian Case of Ninux.org – Stefano Crabu, Federica Giovanella, Leonardo Maccari and Paolo Magaudda
• Enmeshed Lives? Examining the Potentials and the Limits in the Provision of Wireless Networks. The Case of Réseau Libre – Christina Haralanova and Evan Light
• Going Off-the-Cloud: The Role of Art in the Development of a User-Owned & Controlled Connected World – Daphne Dragona and Dimitris Charitos
• Gesturing Towards “Anti-Colonial Hacking” and its Infrastructure – Sophie Toupin
• The Interplay Between Decentralization and Privacy: The Case of Blockchain Technologies – Primavera De Filippi
• Finding an Alternate Route: Towards Open, Eco-cyclical, and Distributed Production – Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak and Kaitlin Kish

Experimental Format

• Alternative Policies for Alternative Internets – Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

The issue is available for free here.

All content by JoPP is in the public domain and is available here.

Photo by HarcoRutgers

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Edited by Andreas Roos, Vasilis Kostakis and Christos Giotitsas.

“Today, two great signs of change are occurring. On the one hand, the capitalist world economy is putting tremendous pressure on the earth’s biosphere and bringing an onslaught of destruction to immediate environments and vulnerable people worldwide. On the other hand, the rise of new and progressive social-economic foundations is the result of an unprecedented increase of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Therefore it is arguably more crucial than ever to understand how social, economic and ecological foundations of the Internet and ICT infrastructures are interwoven. What are we—as scholars, activists and citizens—to make of ICTs that seem to emerge from an economic and social system based upon ecological destruction and social oppression, while at the same time engaging millions of people in the proliferation of information, knowledge and active democratic collaboration? This special issue investigates how we can begin to understand this problem, and how we can hope to balance the perils and promises of ICTs in order to make way for a just and sustainable paradigm.”

Contents

• Introduction: The Materiality of the Immaterial: ICTs and the Digital Commons. (PDF)

• Introducing a Taxonomy of the “Smart City”: Towards a Commons-Oriented Approach? (PDF)

• The Real World of the Decentralized Autonomous Society. (PDF)

• Monetary Materialities of Peer-Produced Knowledge: The Case of Wikipedia and Its Tensions with Paid Labour. (PDF)

• Beyond the Screen: Uneven Geographies, Digital Labour, and the City of Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism. (PDF)

• The Materialist Circuits and the Quest for Environmental Justice in ICT’s Global Expansion. (PDF)

• Commons, Piracy and the Crisis of Property. (PDF)

• Following the Open-Source Trail Outside the Digital World: The Case of Open-Source Seeds. (PDF)

Download the entire special issue here.

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The Spanda Foundation, is “an international civil society organisation (ICSO) to catalyse sustainable long-term systemic change in consciousness, culture, education, health & environment, economics and research“.

Their last special issue on “Creativity & Collective Enlightenment”, published in December 2015, is available here. This issue features a series of articles on the topic, namely:

• Sahlan Momo | Mesocreativity.
• Charles Tart | Enlightenment and Creativity: Grappling with the Angel/Devil of “Non-Duality”.
• Rosa Zubizarreta | Participatory Public Microcosm: Diversity and Empathy as Generators of Creative Wholeness.
• Gerard J. Puccio | Democratizing Creativity: How Creative Thinking Contributes to Individual, Organizational and Societal Success.
• Mónica Edwards-Schachter | On the Interrelationships between Creativity, Learning and Social Innovation.
• Lousie Sunderarjan | Indigenizing Creativity: A Creative Solution to Orientalism in Cross-Cultural Psychology.
• Stanislav Panin | Notion of Evolution and Enlightenment in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Esoteric Literature.
• Jack Harich | Solving Difficult Large-Scale Social System Problems with Root Cause Analysis.
• Paul von Ward | Collective and Evolving Human Consciousness.
• Steve Mcintosh | Toward a Method of Evolving Consciousness.
• Pierre Lévy | Innovation in Coding.

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