"Elsewhere, driven by the acceleration of computing power and connectivity and the simultaneous development of surveillance systems and tracking technologies, we are approaching a theoretical state of absolute informational transparency, one in which "Orwellian" scrutiny is no longer a strictly hierarchical, top-down activity, but to some extent a democratized one. As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information."

"In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did."

"Here's something blindingly obvious, really just a spin on what has been said elsewhere:

Most (?) ordering schemes apply an externally-devised order to the stuff to be ordered: alphabetic order is not something built into the books on your shelf. Or, in the case of Trevor Bechtel, while the color of a book's binding is clearly part of the book, the idea of ordering them on a shelf by color comes purely from Trevor.

Hyperlinks aren't like that. They build into the page itself its place in the webby universe.

Is there something interesting about this other than it's how web spaces construct themselves?"

...to create the world's premier electronic system for individuals and organizations to interact commercially, socially and personally, while providing every entity with control of its information, identity, and relationships consistent with healty communities.

"The history of democracies is usually told as a rebellion against an overweening King - George III for America, Louis XVI for France. In England it is King John, in 1215, and the rebellion gave rise to the Magna Carta which constrained the powers of a king, and providing for a separate body (of barons) to enforce it.

Cromwell's rebellion against Charles I is not often portrayed as democratic, though the accession of William & Mary in 1688 after James's restoration was notable for the English Bill of Rights which further constrained the King's power and in effect made Parliament sovereign.

The history of democracy can be seen as successive (and expanding) answers to the questions:
Who gets to vote?
Who gets to speak?
Who gets to set the topic?

With a single sovereign, or a single parliament, control of the latter two is still tricky; legislative agendas, though longer than historically, are still constrained, and the introduction of legislation is more often reserved to government or elected legislators, and more rarely allowed by referendum.

In a deliberative body, elaborate rules are adopted to ensure only one person speaks at a time.

There is an inherent funneling of debate because of these procedures.

Conversely, online there are millions of conversations happening in parallel, topics are introduced daily, and votes are largely spurious.

The challenge is help these conversations to focus, converge and produce action."

You could almost say that the definition of community is a place where there's gift giving.

The converse of that would be that if you want to destroy community, a good way of doing it is to turn all gift giving into commercial exchanges.

"Opsound is in part an attempt to apply some aspects of open source software's example in the context of music. Like software hackers, musicians are very often motivated by the pleasures of making, and the desire to share their work with others. The way the music industry operates does offer the possibility for a small number of musicians to make a great deal of money, but it doesn't function well for the vast majority of people who are making music. The current situation of the music industry begs for alternative structures to be invented and created."

This book will explore the use of power in the 21st century from a variety of perspectives. Emergentism, which seeks to gather together the lessons of the streets in densely connected societies with the organizational ideas developed as the Internet became the predominant system for global communication in government and business. It will consider the role of the citizen, what is required of the citizen and how the existing states and new entities can organize to provide for the needs of a citizen who participates both directly and indirectly in the social decisions of their world. Business and economics' place in the emergent world will be incorporated into a worldview that seeks to address the power of individual or collective generosity and greed. The role of technology and power in diplomacy and war, as well as in addressing large-scale human and environmental crises, will provide a possibly disturbing insight into the future of the nation-state.

Consider for a moment that virtually all political ideas in their current form today are fewer than 400 years old. In 1650, the Prince and state were one, literally all power was endowed in one person, though the Prince struggled mightily to manage the intrigue that accompanied that power. Nationalism is a phenomenon of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Capitalism, socialism, conservatism and liberalism are all creations of the period since the Prince and the state parted ways, and power began to devolve first to a few and now to many people. Society is a constant flow of change and the state is idea among theses ideas that is the least bound to individual interests. Few today identify with their government, "the state," instead they passionately believe in their neighbors, their culture and the identity they associate with a territory, their nation. Many commentators have predicted the end of the nation and the reemergence of the tribe or village as the central organizing institution in society.

The theory behind this book is that the state, the mercantile-industrial kludge invented to separate the people and the prince from the levers of power, is the most transient organizational artifacts of the modern era. Along with the state will go all the accepted ideas about the meaning of a company regulated by a state and property ownership guaranteed by the state. At the same time, the corporation is an awesome organizational force and private property isn't going anywhere, as most humans are only now getting their first taste of ownership or they are still peering in over the gates at the propertied world wanting at least part of the security in ownership that they see--even collectives perceive themselves as entitled to access to resources, so a traditional village that shares land considers itself as stewards of resources that is analogous to ownership.

Most importantly, with no monolithic state to guarantee their rights and enforce responsibilities, the individual will experience a profound change, one with all the risks and rewards of Pandora's Box. Everything will be possible and permission will come through collaboration with others. With the state fading, but national and local identity still an important component of human identity, a vacuum will open into which someone will step. My bet, the one I hope fervently will succeed, is that no one institution will emerge, but that an emergent community of communities will take pieces of the power of the state, and these communities will begin to interact together with the remaining institutions of the state, international non-governmental organizations, religions, private business and what will surely become a freelance, stateless security "industry" formerly known as the military. Handled deftly, this could turn out very well. If it is bungled, history will turn out very badly indeed.

Having seen first-hand, many times, the power of networked groups, I hold out not hope, but a task, to organize and act, no matter who you are and no matter what it takes.

Another option is LiquidDemocracy . In LiquidDemocracy , everyone does indeed get to vote on every issue. But you can give your vote to a proxy. AND, they can give your vote to their proxy. So, say you don't know much about the space program -- you give your votes on things relating to the space program to someone who has similar political views to you but who knows more about the space program (and they can pass the vote on if they choose).

It seems to me that LiquidDemocracy solves the "ordinary people have no time to learn about every issue" problem.

One way to look at LiquidDemocracy is as representative democracy, but much more fine-grained; you don't have to elect just one guy to represent you on every issue, you can have different specialists for different issues. Second, there is no GerryMandering (at least, not in the process of choosing representatives); your single vote empowers your chosen representative a little bit; you don't have to get more than 50% of the people in your area to vote for the same guy before there is any effect.

More on the idea here (these pages are a bit murky, though; but there are some good "scenarios" in LiquidDemocracyVotingSystem ):

[link] [link]

"Chronic multi-tasking over many years poses a strong risk for ultimate brain damage," says David E. Meyer, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. He is drawing on 30 years of laboratory research and published studies in the field.

Tension and confusion, those consequences wouldn't have surprised me. But brain damage?

Meyer explained: As we force ourselves to bounce from task to task and back again, we generate stress. Body and mind gear up to cope by releasing adrenaline and other hormones. This powerful medicine is good for a crisis, but hard on the machinery.[..]

Apart from brain damage and consequent depression, Meyer also noted the alarming likelihood that multi-taskers are losing the ability to concentrate.

With the geo enabled foaf adhoc mesh internet in your pocket you should be able to turn a big piece of cheese into a hat no problem

broadcast your cheese, your location, and your need for a hat

..maybe money will come into the equation maybe not
..maybe you'll get a free hat and give away your cheese
..maybe you'll meet some friends of friends

the internet is a collaboration, exchange and transformation mechanism soon to have more cool features than money

Carol said, "The name of my band is 'Failure to Disperse.'"

Which is the very activity we are called to right now. Some of the most important work to do now is to fail to disperse and to remind others to fail.

People with microphones who may be more interested in their own interests than in ours are strongly recommending that we disperse.

Suggestions popular now include being scared of the group or groups du jour--gays like me, immigrants like the family I come from, people in other countries we haven't met, poor people, people who aren't pale or aren't suit-bound or both, people who don't live inside.

Be scared of them, miss any connection you might have with them.

Disperse.

If you're in one of the recommended icky groups, be more scared of everyone else.

Disperse.

Also suggested to you by those who want to control you:

Watch lots of TV. Inside, in your own place. So what you mainly know about other groups is what people who plan to profit from your fear tell you to make you scared.

Stay in your car. See other people as good or bad drivers, in your way or not. Don't see their faces and possibly, in their faces, their story. Keep your face behind a windshield so they won't see your face and your story.

Stare at screens. Don't have very many times and places to look at people.

Disperse. Be alone with whatever manipulative info is coming at you through screens. Spend less and less time being in your own physical situation with your own body and your own impressions. Disperse; break < up the connection with your own physical life.

Watch TV and say how stupid it is. That's fine. Just as long as you watch it. Using your intelligence to say that TV is stupid is not really having a very strong connection with your own intelligence.

In fact, it is dispersing from the great new stuff you'd come up with to do if you applied your intelligence to the situation you yourself are actually in. If you came up with great new stuff, you might not follow orders from leaders, so please do watch TV and get off on knowing it's stupid.

money was predicated on spatial constraints

the range of currencies is infinite and the money is intermediary between them

hats are currency, butter is currency,

they get filtered through money (so that ..hats can buy butter at another place and time)

the friction that transportation and distribution and communication among those who would exchange created the right climate for money


the internet is doing some disturbing things

it is creating currencies and ecoonomies with no money intermediary

link economies, peer two peer file sharing economies and software development and exchange economies


this seems to suggest that in the absence of friction money makes less and less sense

in fact in the current climate many things are starting to make less and less sense

and these network economic anomalies will soon slip into the real world

destroying huge industries based on friction difficulty seperateness and centralisation


as exchange without money becomes more efficient and reliable

money won't disappear but will have to start living in parallel with vibrant, aggressive efficient parallel economic forces


the moves towards hardware level copyright controls and crippling copyright legislation

seem more and more like attempts to artificially introduce friction into a system that by its nature is able to remove it entirely

there seems to be the fear that money itself may be on the verge of collapse and that only a radical lockdown can save a civilisation with money at its heart

capitalism is being augmented at a frightening speed

"We ought to be able not only to find any kind of document on the Web, but also to create any kind of document, easily. We should be able not only to follow links, but to create them - between all sorts of media. We should be able not only to interact with other people, but to create with other people. Interactivity is the process of making things or solving problems together. If interactivity is not just sitting ther passively in front of a display screen, then interactivity is not just sitting there in front of something 'interactive'."

"So, why is nobody in the eLearning realm reading Tim Berners-Lee? How come that so many people see the Web mostly as a large distribution and retrieval system? They see designers, creators, domain experts, etc., on one side ... and loads of consumers on the other. Hm... if I think about it... that last sentence reminds me somewhat of schools..."

Whenever neuron A fires, and neuron B fires soon afterwards, the synaptic efficacy increases.

"In studying the Earth's evolution, the most fascinating story I know is that of ancient beings who created an incredibly complex lifestyle, rife with technological successes such as electric motors, nuclear energy, DNA recombination and worldwide information systems. They also produced - and solved - devastating environmental and social crises and provided a wealth of lessons we would do well to consider."

"Their crisis came about when food supplies were exhausted and relatively hi-tech respiring bacteria ("breathers" with electric motor drives) invaded larger more passive fermenting bacteria ("bubblers") to eat their insides out - a process I have called bacterial colonialism or imperialism. The invaders multiplied within these colonies until their resources were exhausted and all parties died. No doubt this happened countless times before they learned cooperation.

Somewhere along the line, the bloated bags of bacteria also included photosynthesizers, "bluegreens," which could replenish food supplies if the motoring breathers would push the enterprise up toward a lighter part of the primeval sea. Perhaps it was this lifesaving use of solar energy that initiated the shift to cooperation.

In any case, bubblers, bluegreens, and breathers eventually contributed their unique capabilities to the common task of building a workable society. In time, each donated some of their "personal" DNA to the central resource library and information hub that became the nucleus of their collective enterprise: the huge (by bacterial standards) nucleated cells of which our own bodies and those of all Earth beings other than bacteria are composed.

This process of uniting disparate and competitive entities into a cooperative whole was repeated when nucleated cells aggregated into multi-celled creatures. Once these biological "governments" evolved, they continued to function beautifully. What nature's healthy bodies and ecosystems exemplify are beautifully unified democracies of diversity, organized by locally productive and mutually cooperative "bioregions," and coordinated by a centralized service government. The underlying and overriding motive is toward healthy production and consumption for all."