ISSUE 104, December 25, 2005, Table of Contents
P2P News,
Issue 104, December 25, 2005
A monitor of P2P
developments; an continuous attempt to construct an emancipatory P2P theory;
for subscriptions write to michelsub2003@yahoo.com
Compiler: Michel Bauwens, michelsub2003@yahoo.com ; P2P News is an emanation of the FOUNDATION FOR PEER TO
PEER ALTERNATIVES
This newsletter is sponsored by WS, at http://www.ws-network.com/
Key Resources:
-
P2P News Archive
at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p ;P2P Theory foundational essay at http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1 ; The Foundation for P2P Alternatives is at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Main_Page ; summary essay on P2P Theory, at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; Delicious P2P tags, at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
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Preferred themes: Peer Production, Peer Governance, Peer
Property; the Commons, the Public Domain; Participatory Spirituality; towards
an emancipatory P2P Theory
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The ABC of
P2P: Citizen Engineers; Citizen Science; Cognitive Capitalism; Collaborative Citizen Journalism; Commons; Creative Commons; Customer-build network
infrastructures; Death of Exchange Value; Diffuse Innovation; Egocasting; File-served Television; General Public License; Grey Tuesday; Internet TV Tuner; Internet Telephony; Mass Amateurization; Mesh Networks; Minipreneurs - Resources; Mobcasting; Mobile Social Software; Open Business Process Initiative; Open Courseware Initiative; Open Money; Open Source Commercialization; Open Source Initiative; Open Source Licenses; Open Source telephony; Open Spectrum; P2P Streaming Infrastructure; P2P TV; PC to Phone telephony; Panarchy; Participatory Culture; Participatory Journalism; Participatory Management - Semco; Patronage economy; Peer Production - Funding; Personal Fabricators; Personal Telco Movement; Podcasting; Production without Manufacturer; Public Domain; RSS; Self in Conversation; Self-Informing Public; Self-Publishing; Skype; Social
Physics; Social Software; Socialization of Innovation; TV IP; User-centered Innovation; User-driven Advertizing; Video Sharing Network; Video-sharing Network; Viral Communicators; Vlogging; VoIP Telephones; Voice over WiFi; Webcasting; Wikipedia; Wireless Commons; Writeable Web (see the P2P Encyclopedia at http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Category:Encyclopedia )
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Thematic
Issue Index: Issue 104 = P2P Political Practices; Issue
103 = Funding for Peer Production; Issue 102 = P2P and Market
Exchange, practices; Issue 101 = P2P and Market Exchange, theory; Issue 100
= P2P Social Software, theory and tools; Issue 99 = P2P Monetary Issues, bottom-up
alternatives and top-down reform; Issue
98 = 1) P2P Economic
Governance , tools; 2) P2P and Capitalism; Issue 97 = P2P and Economic Governance, theory;
Issue 96 = P2P and Nature, theories and
technologies; Issue 95 = Multitudes; Issue 94 = P2P Technologies; Issue 93 = P2P Political Theory and Practice;
Issue 92 = 1) Peer Production; 2) Empire and
Multitudes (Europe and South America); Issue 91 = Miscellaneous; Issue 90 = Peer Governance; Issue 89 = 1) P2P Capitalism; 2) P2P
Epistemology; Issue 88 = 1) P2P Cooperation; 2) P2P
Spirituality; Issue 87 = 1) P2P Capitalism; 2) P2P
Hierarchy Theory; Issue 79
= Alternative Monetary
Theory and Practice; Issue 77
= 1) P2P Commons; 2)
P2P Epistemology; Issue 76 = 1) P2P Cooperation; 2) P2P Activism
(available at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p )
Support:
-
This
newsletter is sponsored by the WS Network, at http://www.ws-network.com/; a group of associates who help organizations
`achieve breakthrough opportunities in a complex environment', using a variety
of innovative strategies and methods. Contact Philippe Vandenbroeck at philippe.vandenbroeck@ws-network.com; or Alain Wouters at alain.wouters@ws-network.com
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Material
support has been received from the following individuals: THE
P2P HALL OF FAME: Brice Leblevennec, for the hosting of the wiki-website; James Burke,
untiring in his moral and practical support; Philippe Vandenbroeck &
Alain Wouters, for their sponsorship; Michel Dubois, for hosting
P2P News; Kris Roose and Frank Visser, for hosting the early
versions of the P2P essay; Jim Puntasen, for crucial support here in
Thailand; John Heron, for his spiritual guidance. Thanks also to Salvino
Salvaggio, Jaap van Till, Bonnita Roy, Jan Van den Bergh, Luc Hoebeke, George Dafermos and the rest of the family
Puntasen (Apichai, Titiporn).Total collected so far: EUR 3,550). More is
needed, please donate!
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Contributors:
Thanks for regularly suggesting links: John Dermaut,
Christophe Lestavel, John L. Petersen, George Dafermos, Jim Hightower, David
Spillane, Larry Penslinger, Nik Baerten, Maurice Nsabimana, Tattoo Mabonzo,
Philippe Van Nedervelde, Pascal Houba, Jaap van Till, Geert Drieghe, Darren
Sharp, and the Multitudes and Oekonux mailing lists for regular suggestions; Thanks
in particular to JamesBurke of Lifesized, http://lifesized.blogspot.com/; Kris Roose, at http://www.noosphere.cc/
"On
November 2, 2005, the Pew Internet & American Life Project released the
results from a large-scale survey among US teenagers. "More than half
of online teens are Content Creators. Some 57% of online teens create content
for the internet. That amounts to half of all teens ages 12-17, or about 12
million youth. These Content Creators report having done one or more of the
following activities: create a blog; create or work on a personal webpage;
create or work on a webpage for school, a friend, or an organization; share
original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos online; or remix
content found online into a new creation." This is the first time in
history when using media has become synonymous with, or perhaps been replaced
by, producing media."
(deuze.blogspot.com
)
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Oligopoly 2005
* "the world's top
10 seed companies have increased their control from one-third to one-half of
the global seed trade;
* the top 10 biotech enterprises have
raised their share from just over half to nearly three-quarters of world
biotech sales;
* the market share of the top 10
pesticide manufacturers rose modestly, from 80 to 84%, but industry analysts
predict that only three companies will survive the next decade;
* the top 10 pharmaceutical companies
control almost 59% market share of the world's leading 98 drug firms
(previously the top 10 accounted for 53% market share of 118 companies)."
(Oligopoly, Inc: Concentration in Corporate Power
2005, at http://www.etcgroup.org/article.asp?newsid=527)
CONTENTS
THE
FOUNDATION SITE
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For a good summary of the key ideas
around P2P Theory, see the essay for CTheory, at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499;
in French: www.p2pfoundation.net.
Thai and Italian versions also available.
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A completely updated bound version of
the P2P manuscript is available in PDF format, in print, for EURO 20.
Send me an email with your postal address. Please support this initiative by
ordering a copy.
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The Foundation site now has available: a
Directory of P2P Individuals; a first listing of P2P Books; a
directory of P2P Movements; a directory of P2P Resources (tools and
software); a P2P Encyclopedia; and thematic access to the main
themes covered by the special issues. Contributions are welcome at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Main_Page
-
Statistics on readership of the related Integral
Visioning material is available at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=stats
ELSEWHERE
ON THE WEB AND BLOGOSPHERE
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Excellent summary of the notes by
John Heron
which appeared in this newsletter, recast in the Integral Leadership Review
under the title: Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality, at http://www.leadcoach.com/archives/e-journal/2005_12jh.html
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Thai version of a essay on P2P, at http://www.rasmi-trrm.org/index.php?lay=show&ac=article&Id=252522
; thanks to Jim Puntasen for the translation and support
http://www.paulsalamone.com/blog/2005/12/fiction-to-transcend-capitalism.html
I find this to be a really great interpretation of P2P
theory, from the blog of Boulder-based Paul Salamone.
Paul
Salamone: "To summarize my interpretation of k-punk's masterful analysis of a
recent talk held by Zizek and Badiou
concerning the ideas of capitalism, populism, and the use of fictions to enact
change (see also here
and here),
the future of the Left lies in creating an alluring counter-fiction to the
seductive appeal of capitalist commodity fetishism. It is not enough to expose
the lies and exploitation of corporate liberalism (a "politics of
truth" which has failed to gain any ground), we must install an
alternative belief system and compelling means of being-in-the-world, a
"fiction" to which we commit our lives. What might this
post-capitalist fiction be? As k-punk states, this fiction is not be something
"imaginary", but an "already-operative generator of
possibilities". I can think of no more compelling an example of such a
"generator" as the peer-to-peer and open source movements which have
captured the imaginations of the internet.
Michael Bauwens
has written a brilliant (albeit lengthy) manifesto of sorts demonstrating the
neo-marxist evolutionary potential of the P2P revolution, which he sees as the
next major shift in production, a "relational dynamic" to succeed
Fordist industrialism (which itself begat agriculture, which begat foraging
etc). Though P2P has its correlates in the corporate world, the bulk of P2P
seems to be one without capacity for generating money, relying on such
non-capitalist values as sharing, responsibility, innovation, and mutual trust.
Key quote:
So the general conclusion of all the above has to be the essentially
cooperative nature of production, the fact that companies are drawing on this
vast reservoir of a 'commons of general intellectuality', without which they
could not function. That innovation is diffused throughout the social body.
That, if we accept John Locke's argument that work that adds value should be
rewarded, then it makes sense to reward the cooperative body of humankind, and
not just individuals and entrepreneurs. All this leads quite a few social
commentators, from both left and liberal (free enterprise advocates), to bring
the issue of the universal wage on the agenda and to retrieve the early Marxian
notion of the 'General Intellect'.
Obviously, I know fuck-all about economics, much less politics, which is
perhaps the point: even with my limited theoretical understanding, I can
grok P2P, which proves its eligibility for uptake by a global populist movement.
This vision I dub Open-Source World, and it takes as its marching orders
the transformation of the entire planet, all modes of production and
ways-of-being, into a massive P2P open source project, a Wiki
for the Kosmos. Don't like the way your government is run? Sick of global
economic policies? Wish the media would cover the Alaskan caribou elections?
Download the "source code" and patch where you see fit. A global
network of World OS coders will review your work, preserve what fits,
jettison what threatens the health of everyone else, and things will proceed
apace. "Citizen hackers" will dot the globe, and life, reality, will
be under constant revision, and improvement. People will be so busy hacking
their lives they won't have time to fetishize useless commodities (unless, of
course, useless commodities are created by a P2P crew, and use that as a
selling point). Whether an Open-Source World is "true" or
not is besides the point: its compelling, and that's enough."
www.communicationagents.com
Tom Attlee's analysis brings together two strands, the
emergence of new practices of dialogue and deliberation, and the spread of
holistic philosophies and spiritual practices. The latter is an often forgotten
part of social reality. While the left was reeling under the neoliberal
onslaught of the 80s and 90s, and some social gains were lost in the
unprecendented era of growing inequality; an important section of the Western
population did not sit still, but actively created new practices of life: new
educational philosophies for the children, new non-mechanistic medicines for
our bodies, new ecologically friendly lifestyles, fair trade commercial
practices, and in fact, new modes of governance, i.e. the new practices of
dialogue and deliberation. While the old left was defending the gains of the
past (a necessary thing), and the postmodern new left was developing its micropolitics
born out of the defeated macropolitics of 1968, the spiritual left took up the
task of actually changing daily life, human relationships, and the connectedness
with the natural world. Through its development of what in fact were the new
modes of `peer' governance, it is now ready to merge into the broader peer to
peer and open source movements.
In our second section Tom Attlee offers an
evolutionary account of such methods, in seven stages, and we wonder if an
eight stage is not missing. If we look at representative democracy, our current
system, it started with the representatives being advisory bodies to the king,
and then a fundamental change occurred, they themselves became the sovereign
bodies. Perhaps Attlee stops at that stage, seeing peer governance only as as
an adjunct to representative democracy, not seeing that it might one day also
become the primary mode?
1. Tom Attlee
Tom
Attlee: "The increasing sophistication of dialogue and deliberation
methodologies over the past two decades, combined with increasingly
sophisticated communication and knowledge-management systems, as well as the
spread of holistic philosophies and spiritual practices, suggests that we are
rapidly increasing our ability to generate collective intelligence and wisdom
through well-designed communications. We now face the task of bringing that
capacity into the public trust and into official practice.
To
clarify part of that developmental trajectory, we can map a spectrum (below)
that reflects the growing empowerment and legitimization of citizen dialogue
and deliberation. We can start with a category that embraces all types and
qualities of such conversations and public engagements -- the ecosystem, if you
will, of democratic discourse within which diverse species of dialogue and
deliberation interact and evolve. As the more complex,
sophisticated, energy-demanding forms evolve, we find there are fewer of them
than of the simpler forms -- just as a forest has more fungi, ants and flowers
than it has deer, owls and people. To maximize sustainability and productivity,
there need to be rich interconnections between the simpler forms and the more
complex forms -- in fact, among all the forms. In this vision of democratic
dialogue and deliberation, we find that the most coherent and powerful forms demand
a higher level of energy, resources and attention than the simpler forms.
So, whereas the simple forms tend to be (at least potentially) cheap, numerous
and inclusive of anyone who wants to show up, the more complex forms are more
expensive, fewer, and directly involve fewer (and more carefully chosen) people
who are given privileged access to a level of information and facilitation help
that allows them to generate greater collective intelligence and wisdom.
If
we focus merely on mass participation, we cannot afford these more complex and
wisdom-generating forums which are too expensive to engage hundreds of
thousands of people. However, if we focus only on the complex and potent forms,
we get a kind of elite collective intelligence and wisdom
which, although still grounded in the citizenry, has not been informed,
digested and owned by the broader population, generating a sort of democratic
elitism much as has happened with the evolution of representative democracy. To
prevent both of these extremes, we need to synergistically weave together
simpler, more widely participatory modes with the rarer, more potent and
demanding modes of citizen deliberation.
The collective intelligence of the population as a whole needs to be in
constant conversation with the wisdom generated by groups of citizens selected
to work with especially high quality information and deliberative tools. Thus, the ideal
"culture of dialogue" will include forums at all levels of the
spectrum outlined below until we reach the most developed stage, where a true
cultural shift has happened -- away from fragmented battles, towards collective
intelligence and wisdom -- at which point many of these distinctions will
become obsolete.
The spectrum below attempts to lay out a progression of forms from the simplest
(1) to the more complex and powerful (6), before breaking through to a new
culture (7). Note that this spectrum is centered on CITIZEN dialogue and
deliberation. Not mentioned, but not excluded, are other forms of dialogue and
deliberation, particularly stakeholder dialogues and legislative deliberations.
They play significant roles in this vision of a wise democracy, but (from this
citizen-centered perspective) the locus of power and collective intelligence is
firmly established in the dialogue and deliberation of CITIZENS. Stakeholder
dialogues and legislative deliberations serve to augment the collective
intelligence generated by citizen discourse."
2. THE
SPECTRUM (with examples)
1. Citizen dialogue
and deliberation (of any and all kinds) (e.g., conversation cafes)
2. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome (i.e.,
whole-group statements, actions or outcomes) (e.g., deliberative polling)
3. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into
policy-making and decision-making (usually in an advisory role) (e.g., National Issues
Forums)
4. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into
policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect
the diversity of the community (e.g., citizen deliberative councils)
5. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into
policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect the
diversity of the community and the whole process is officially
institutionalized (e.g., consensus conferences)
6. Citizen dialogue and deliberation with a coherent outcome that plugs into
policy-making and decision-making where the citizens are selected to reflect
the diversity of the community
and the whole process is officially institutionalized and empowered such that
it drives policy-making (e.g., B.C.'s Citizens Assembly)
7. A democratic political and governance system that is grounded in 1-6 above
at least as much -- or more than -- in the competitive lobbying, voting,
litigating modes of politics.
In other words, we can
have communities filled with study circles, intergroup dialogues, future
searches, conversation cafes, world cafes, and all the other amazing processes
listed on such sites as the National Coalition for Dialogue and
Deliberation wiki (1-6, above). These can generate a
powerful background hum of conversations through which people are connecting
up, exploring and learning together, and doing good work together. Some of them
help public officials take the pulse of the community on important issues,
seeing how citizens think about them.
Arising from that hum of powerful democratic conversations are some
special conversations among people selected from the community to embody the
community's diversity, charged with deliberating or reflecting on particularly
important community issues and reporting back to the community (4-6, above).
These conversations are sometimes given not just an advisory role, but real
power to make decisions.The more all these fit together into a coherent whole,
the closer we get to a wise democracy."
See also Tom's map
of Community Intelligence, at http://co- intelligence.org/CommunityIntelligenceMap.pdf
http://harmonization.blogspot.com/
Representative democracy, it has been said, is the
marriage of the dictatorship of the majority with protections for the minority,
and is in fact unthinkable with an apparatus of coercion which can both impose
the majority decision and protect the minority. But throughout history this is
an anomaly. Much more common were authoritarian states, coupled with, wherever
that state was ineffective or didn't want to intervene, local consensus-based
modes of governance. The problem was that the local could never outgrow itself.
The promise of the P2P enabling technologies is that local limitations can be
overcome through globally operating cybercollectives. Our current modes of peer
governance can of course learn from the older modes, and this is what this
article and blog addresses. These older forms were based on consensus (since
the majority did not have a state to coerce the minority) and used processes of
`harmonization'.
1. Richard Moore on Harmonization
"Harmonization
is an ancient tradition. When problems came up in aboriginal societies, the
people of a tribe would typically meet in council and talk together until they
all agreed on how the problem would be dealt with. Usually a respected elder of
the tribe would act as facilitator in such a council, making sure that everyone
got to express their point of view. Native American tribes operated this way,
and we can still find examples today, in those few remote societies that
continue to preserve their traditional ways. From our modern perspective, we
can describe these societies as direct democracies, using harmonization as their
process of governance.
When agriculture and civilization came along, this democratic from of
governance was supplanted by hierarchical rule under an all-powerful chief or
king. Harmonization was no longer part of the culture, and today most of us would
probably doubt that such a process is even possible: How could a liberal and
a conservative, for example, hope to agree on a common solution to a
controversial societal problem? Aren't their differences too deep for that to
happen?
Fortunately, however, harmonization is a practice that is still possible for
us, despite our apparent conflicts and differences. The problem is that our
culture does not encourage the practice, nor does it afford us opportunities to
exercise it. When the conditions are right, people are not only capable of
harmonizing their concerns, but they find the experience liberating and
empowering. In Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, I describe several recent
examples in which amazing results have been achieved in harmonization sessions.
A draft of this chapter is available on the web:
Ch. 5 - part 1 ; Ch. 5 - part 2
The basic conditions that
make harmonization possible are: (1) a group of people who share common
problems; (2) a competent facilitator; (3) a face-to-face session with adequate
time allocated
2. William Ury's Third Side Individuals
A
related harmonisaton technique is the one centered around the formation of
`third side individuals' as formulated by William Ury, see http://www.thirdside.org/resources.cfm?language=English
Ury,
William (2000). The Third Side:Why We Fight and How We Can Stop. New York: Penguin.
Ury, William (2001). Must We Fight?: From the Battlefield to the Schoolyard
-- A New Perspective on Violent Conflict and Its Prevention. New York: John Wiley
& Sons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_politics
"The open politics movement parallels the free software
and open content movements, and relies on both to create what is claimed to be
a more "open" and "transparent" means of decision making in
politics."
"The open politics movement parallels the free
software and
open content
movements, and relies on both to create what is claimed to be a more
"open" and "transparent" means of decision
making in politics. It grew from earlier work in online deliberation and deliberative democracy, which in turn drew on research in issue-based argument and early hypertext and Computer Supported Cooperative Work research of the early 1980. Gradually, as there came to
be more and more software and content of political and legal interest, there
also came to be more and more entities relying on it for decisions.
The 2003-04 Deanspace project is widely considered to be the first serious
attempt at open politics. It grew into civicspace and was largely relying on blog and meetup technologies to build some support behind Democratic Party dark horse Howard
Dean. It
was largely an emergent, unplanned effort. In fact, meetup.com simply applied its ordinary stupid algorithm to a number
of members who had listed "Howard Dean" (a mere text string to that
algorithm) in their list of interests. It obediently buzz-clicked out a scheduled time for a live "meetup", and
open politics history began, with no intelligence being directly involved at
all (which some find ironic, and others, fitting). The 2004-05 Green Party of Canada Living Platform was a much more planned and designed effort at open
politics. As it prepared itself for an electoral breakthrough in the 2004 Canadian federal election, the Green Party of Canada began to compile citizen, member and expert opinion in
preparation of its platform. During the election, it gathered input even from Internet
trolls
including supporters of other parties, with no major problems - anonymity was respected and comments remained intact if they were
within the terms of use at all. Also, candidates who had answered citizen
questionnaires were encouraged to share answers with other candidates. All of
this material was intended to provide input to the GPC's next platform. An
elaborate process for this, relying on yahoogroups and tikiwiki, was created by staff and advisors, but was derailed by Jim Harris (politician), the party's leader, when he discovered that it was a
threat to his plan to make policy without input from the party - a plan in
direct contradiction of the party's history and avowed policy of participatory democracy. This was one of many long standing tensions between
Harris' clique and the party as a whole, and it remains unresolved. The Living
Platform
split off as another service entirely out of GPC control and eventually evolved
into openpolitics.ca and a service to set up policy wikis for other groups.
Today it is largely at openpolitics.ca that the theory of open politics is
being debated. Their definition of the term itself is "a methodology to achieve good government"
but of course any political
party
claims to have such a method or system.
Today the dkosopedia.com project to document all Guantanamo
Bay
detainees is probably the most notable and worthy open politics project. It is
supported by the ACLU and
former President of the United States Jimmy
Carter. See Open Politics Canada for a thriving
example at http://openpolitics.ca/2/tiki-index.php This report on a deliberative
democracy project in Perth
also has a good definition and references to the literature on the evolution of
this movement, at http://www.activedemocracy.net/articles/jhk-dialogue-city.pdf"
Different
articles on the `open politics' and `open parties' theme at Open Democracy, at http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-open_politics/issue.jsp
http://mtl3p.ilesansfil.org/blog/archives/2005/09/26/building_soccer_fields_in_downtown_montreal.html
Why is merely providing broadband wireless access to
all a highly charged political act? This is well explained in the following
blog entry by one of the leaders of the Montreal
"Ile Sans Fil" project, who explains how they are `hacking the city'.
"We
are hacking the built city.This statement is based on the idea that as wireless
devices and services proliferate and ubiquitous computing becomes a reality,
the physical environment (especially the built city) is rapidly becoming
enhanced space or mixed-reality. The supposedly seperate existences of off-line
and on-line are intersecting and overlapping - most rapidly in cities.
That's
obvious and basic knowledge to most of you.
Where
this get's exciting is that by citizens, artists and non-profit groups
developing and adapting these technologies (portable devices, wireless
connectivity, mobile- and location-based applications) and their model
(who is supposed to use them and for what purpose) we are able to impact and
change this enhanced space and through that have an actual impact on how the
built city is experienced. To be sure, we have constraints on how much we
can hack the city - it's not as if we can easily directly confront the power of
the the police or building developpers. But we can work to allow spaces to
better retain memories, to promote both stronger and a larger number of looser
associations between individual, to increase valuing of art and artists, or to
help people get laid (more) on the basis of shared interests as well as looks.
Another
way of describing this: I'm most excited about is the idea that ISF is building
soccer fields. This is my new favorite way of explaining a major thing that I
think is important about ISF. At the conference, one of the organizers told us
this great story of a non-profit that wanted to help a local community of new
immigrants from South or Central America that
was having lots of problems. Their kids were having difficulties at school,
there was lots of spousal abuse, violence in the neighborhood, etc. Instead of
starting a program to attack this or that issue (after-school programs, men
support groups, increased police presence) the foundation spent $100,000 to
build a soccer field in the area. And the problems were significantly reduced
over the following two years.
Why?
Because people from the community got together to play soccer and after and
before the games started talking to each other about their problems. They
realized that their problems were shared problems, systematic problems, and
they became able to access each other as resources. The soccer field provided
them the ability to increase the strong and lose ties in their community and
they were able to self-organize to procure the resources they needed to improve
life in their community.
I
felt weird calling myself an activist at this conference while sitting beside
people who were working on human-rights in the Philippines
or on improving democratic voter-turnout in the southern states of the US.
When presenting ISF during speedgeek I was worried about people's perception of
ISF (and of me) as legitimately "activist". During sessions on
brainstorming they were all thinking of ways to use SMS messages for this
voter-turn out campaign or to get news past that repressive government. I was
preoccupied with wondering where the social software was for mobile phones
(yes, besides Dodgeball) and why *every* project used a one-to-many push or a
many-to-one pull conception (as opposed to groups within groups, individuals as
network-bridgers, etc). I loved hearing the example of the soccerfield and having
the idea legitimized of providing platforms that were not explicitly geared
towards this or that agenda but that strengthened community by such things
as increasing the abilities of individuals and groups and lowering the barriers
they face towards community-oriented activities and organizing as well as
minimizing the completely unlevel playing field that we are on with for-profit
(and resultingly resource-rich) entities in terms of controlling our
communities. (that was an ugly sentence - sorry)."
http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=362&BookID=292
In what precise ways does
the internet benefit, or not, social movements?
"This book leads to at least nine other
conclusions. First, at this point in their use, ICTs seem to benefit social
movement efforts directed at international issues. Second, the use of
ICTs does facilitate the establishment of lines of communication between people
who might otherwise find it hard (the first conclusion is really a sub-set of
this second conclusion). Third, new kinds of organizations -- virtual
organizations -- have come into existence. Fourth, an organization's or
movement's purpose and structure are more likely to influence how ICTs are used
than the other way around. Fifth, ICTs are an extension of and alternative
to old-style mass- and mainstream-communications that can open access to
mass- and mainstream-communications to social movements wider than in the
past and that some unique opportunities for action and access are facilitated
by the use of ICTs. Sixth, nevertheless, social movements and organizations
that adapt to the status quo are more likely to have an impact than those that
use more radical means. Seventh, that the fluidity of networks and
coalitions using ICTs may result in efforts the origins and effects of which
are much harder to detect. Eighth, a new type of social movement may
be rising that intentionally works beneath the radar of traditional media
(see the quote from Borio on page 79). Ninth and finally, there will
continue to be a need for intermediaries in large democracies, but who and what
will serve as those intermediaries may change or be replaced."
More book reviews on the politics of the
internet here at http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/booklist.asp
2. New media campaigns and
the managed citizen
URL = http://www.managedcitizen.org/
Keith Hampton says "New Media Campaigns and the Managed
Citizen is a
solid empirical study, it is one of the few thorough studies out there and will
become a must read for anyone studying political communication."
The
political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy,
and whether issue- or candidate-specific, it is one of the least understood
organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical
assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in
contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data,
and social network analysis, Philip Howard examines the evolving act of
political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over
the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both
grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia
strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary
political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and
fund-raising and at the same time adapts its organizational behavior. The new
system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning
of citizenship and the basis of representation.
(http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/11/23/new_book_on_med.html)
Book:
New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. Philip
N. Howard. University of Washington.
Cambridge University Press, 2005
3. Information Politics on the Web
URL = http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2005/11/06/information_pol.html
On
November 1 The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)
awarded Richard Rogers 'Information Politics on the Web' (MIT
Press, 2004) as the `Best Information Science Book of the Year'.
Richard
Rogers is Director of govcom.org, an
Amsterdam-based foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political tools on
the Web, and Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Excerpt:
Does the
information on the Web offer many alternative accounts of reality, or does it
subtly align with an official version? In 'Information Politics on the Web,
Richard Rogers identifies the cultures, techniques, and devices that rank and
recommend information on the Web, analyzing not only the political content of
Web sites but the politics built into the Web's infrastructure. Addressing the
larger question of what the Web is for, Rogers
argues that the Web is still the best arena for unsettling the official and
challenging the familiar.
Here's a two hour video by the MIT on The
Future of the Digital Commons, at http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/303/
This
is a very strong critique of the anti-intellectualism said to
characterize the new activist movements, at http://lipmagazine.org/articles/featfeatherstone_activistism.shtml
http://www.constantvzw.com/transmedia_archive/000101.html
Brian Holmes that peer production does not only
produce use value in terms of knowledge and software, but also a new
`politics'.
"Benkler
identifies four attributes of the networked information economy that favor
commons-based peer production. First, information must be freely available an
inexhaustible raw material for products which, in their turn, will become
inexhaustible raw materials for further productions. Second, potential
collaborators must be able to easily identify the specific project that
inspires them to contribute their creativity and labor. Third, the cost of production
equipment must be low, as is now the case for things like computers and related
media devices. Fourth, it must be possible to broadly distribute the results,
for instance, over a telecommunications net. Under these conditions, quite
complex tasks can be imagined, divided into small modules, and thrown out into
the public realm where individuals will self-identify their competency to meet
any given challenge. The only remaining requirement for large-scale production
of cultural and informational goods is to be able to perform quality checks and
integrate all the individual modules with relatively low effort into a
completed whole - but these tasks, it turns out, can often be done on a
distributed basis as well. The fact that all of this is possible, and
actually happening today, allows Benkler to contradict Ronald Coase's classic
theory, which identifies the firm, with its hierarchical command structure, and
the market, functioning through the individual's quest for the lowest price, as
the only two viable ways to organize human production. In other words, in
the cultural and informational domain there is an alternative mode of
production, functioning outside the norms of the state-capitalist economy as we
know it, but without any rhetorical need to proclaim a clean break or an
absolute division between them.One could apply exactly the same ideas to the
growing phenomenon of networked political protests.
It
is clear that mass access to email and the possibility to create personal web
pages - both of which have been quite necessary to the world expansion of
liberal capitalism - almost immediately made possible, not only a greater
awareness of globalization and its effects, but also the self-organization of
dissenting movements on a world scale. And the scope of the projects that have
been realized in this sense has been tremendous. Just reflect for a moment
on what all the major "counter-globalization" campaigns have
involved: collaborative research on the political, social, cultural, and
ecological issues at stake; various levels of coordination between a wide range
of already constituted groups, concerning the preliminary forms of
mobilization; worldwide dissemination, through every possible channel, of the
research and the preliminary positions; travel of tens or hundreds of thousands
of single persons and autonomous groups to a given place; self-organization of
a meeting and sleeping place; intellectual and political cooperation on some
form of counter-summit; the creation of artistic and cultural events in the
spirit of the movements; a minimal agreement, worked out beforehand or in the
heat of the moment, on the specific forms and places of the symbolic and direct
actions to be undertaken; legal and medical coordination in order to ensure the
demonstrators' security; the installation of communications systems allowing
for the transmission of precise yet exceedingly diverse coverage of the events;
a social, legal, and political follow-up of the aftermath; and a subsequent
analysis of the new situation that results from each confrontation.
In
this sense one could say that, just like the projects of commons-based peer
production, these mobilization begin and end with the fabrication of publicly
available texts.
For example, the People's Summit held in Quebec City in April 2001 began long in advance, with many
different studies of the probably consequences of the future agreement on the
Free Trade Area of the Americas.
These studies led to the drafting of a remarkable document, "Alternatives
for the Americas,"
which is a counter treaty of great precision, drafted through a process of
knowledge exchange and political coordination on the scale of the American
hemisphere. Finally, as a direct consequence of the massive demonstration that
took place during the official summit, the working draft of the FTAA treaty was
made public for the first time; until then it had not even been available to
elected representatives of the American peoples, but only to executive
negotiating teams and, of course, corporate "advisers." And yet
between the fundamental landmarks represented by these text publications, how
many face-to-face debates took place, how many exchanges of ideas and thoughts,
how many moments of solitary or collective creation, how many acts of courage
or solidarity? And how many emotions, images, memories, and desires were
created and shared during those days of action?
"High-tech
gift economy": www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook
"Cooking pot
markets": www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/ghosh
COGNITIVE CAPITALISM
-
Tom Peter interviews the author of The
PayPal Wars, at http://tompeters.com/cool_friends/content.php?note=008412.php
-
Tom Peters interviews Dave Balter of Grapevine,
the author of a book on word-of-mouth marketing, at http://tompeters.com/cool_friends/content.php?note=008427.php
-
Google's Adwords, how does it work, at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050922.html
-
The plans of the telco carriers to make
bandwidth artificially scarce and to charge for priority sending, at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051215_141991.html?
-
Research on the time-money continuum (how
money is substituted for time and vice versa) in household consumption, at http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/ppdp/2005/ppdp053.htm
EMPIRE
-
An argument that the European Union has no
legitimacy, at http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-opening/fundamentals_3112.jsp
P2P
-
LabCMO is a research group combining free
software and computer-mediated communications, at http://cmo.uqam.ca/
- Video coverage of the WTO Hong Kong and related protests, at
http://radiohongkong.de/ ;
http://www.archive.org/stream/WTOHongKong/WTOHongKong.rm - Summary of French internet legislation, at
http://www.globenet.org/IMG/pdf/internet-et-la-loi.pdf - The cultural, artistic, and `archiving' impact of filesharing is explored in a series of fascinating essays accompagnying a major exhibition about the MP3 phenomenom, at
http://www.digitalcraft.org/index.php?artikel_id=498 (thanks to Geert Lovink) - What matters in filesharing is the ability to share musical taste, says a new Berkman report, at
http://www.ratiatum.com/news2674_Une_etude_montre_les_benefices_du_partage_de_musique.html - Interview with Sylvain Zimmer, founder of the Jamendo free music software platform, which is getting rave reviews for the quality of its music, at
http://www.ratiatum.com/dossier2215_Jamendo_la_musique_libre_prise_au_serieux.html - 4-part series on the P2P revolution, by Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library, with many responses, at
http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate.jsp?debateId=101&id=8 - Tape it off the internet , a global TV guide and torrent tracker, at
http://www.tapeitofftheinternet.com/
POLITICS
- dkosopedia
URL = http://www.dkosopedia.com/index.php/Main_Page
"a collaborative project of the DailyKos community
to build a political encyclopedia. The dKosopedia is written from
a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point
of view while also attempting to fairly acknowledge the other side's take.
It was started in April of 2004, and currently consists of 3911 articles."
-
Center for Digital Democracy
URL = http://www.democraticmedia.org/
The Center for Digital Democracy is a nonprofit organization
working to ensure that the digital media systems serve the public interest.
-
The
Democracy Design Workshop
URL = http://www.nyls.edu/pages/1484.asp
The Democracy Design Workshop is a laboratory dedicated to
fostering innovation in support of participatory and deliberative democratic
practice. The Workshop aims to be a meetinghouse for thinkers and practitioners
who, through research,
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