What pricing is for market allocation, and decisions are for planning, mutual coordination is for commons economics. Two previous experiments, the failed Russian internet described in Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty and the Cybersin experiment described in Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, failed. We have argued that commons-oriented peer production offers a unique chance to revive these practices (see here), but below, Eden Medina looks back at what went wrong in Chile, even before Pinochet destroyed the project:
More and more, the Internet is the place where we meet up with our friends, get information, organise work, store our pictures and texts, do our banking, see videos, buy tickets and get public services. As we use the Internet extensively, we begin to be “known“ through the Internet equally intimately. Soon, it will also hold extensive transactional information from the many “things” in our daily lives—the entire range of domestic devices as well as public and private infrastructure and services. All this knowledge is power, which can be put to good use or bad. Not only does the Internet increasingly hold too much information about us, with the advancing networked automation and remote access, it provides the power to reach anywhere to control physical spaces and activities.
You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and that’s the Internet’s biggest problem today. For more than two decades the very backbone of theInternet..
"Community networks are bottom-up, grassroots projects set up by tech enthusiasts and local groups that care about digital access and community choice. They take all kinds of forms, from wireless mesh in neighborhoods to huge hybrid networks blanketing whole regions with a combination of DIY “microtrenched” fiber, so-called air fiber, and different kinds of wireless nodes." Way to go for digital citizens!
Fantastic places. Places where the Internet actually works well. Where you can download a movie in under a minute. Where your Wi-Fi doesn't stop working for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Defining Google as the most visited website in the world fails to give its prevalence the recognition it deserves. As a search engine, its role in our digital lives is of paramount importance. It is the first place many of us look for information on everything from healthcare to shopping. Following from this, how Google presents us with information is of great importance to the fundamental structure of information online. Along with its notable successes, it also presents its users with well defined problems of information diversity, autonomy, and privacy, all of which stem from various censorship and filtering practices.
Old television frequencies should be used to create new bandwidths for a super-frequency WiFi to prevent overloading of the mobile networks and boost the economy, instead of being auctioned off to the highest bidder, say German scientists.
“The Green Web Foundation wants to facilitate the transition towards the Internet being powered by sustainable “green” energy. Why do we need that? How much electricity is the Internet using? What is the power used for? What is the difference between green and gray hosting? Does efficient equal ‘green’ as well? Find answers to these questions below.
In this video, we share our view on the needs, challenges, and solutions to collaborative, open innovation in connected and automated vehicles from the perspective of innovation platforms and...
Excerpted from William Irwin Thompson: “DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will alter the center-periphery dialectic of traditional civilization and make a whole new cultural level possible. What will take place in the metaindustrial village will be that the four classical economies of human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry, and cybernetics, will …
Call for an Internet Social Forum The Internet belongs to all people – Let’s occupy it More and more, the Internet is the place where we meet up with our friends, get information, organise work, store our pictures and texts, do our banking, see...
ou’d be forgiven for thinking that the tech world is a loathsome hotbed of rapacious venture capitalists, airheaded trend-riders, and publicity hounds. That’s the image presented by much of the tech press, which prizes stories about the Montgomery Burnses of the tech world over ones about its more idealistic denizens.
“The project is about creating a wireless networking infrastructure as a commons and building a community around it. It is not just about bringing the Internet to remote areas. Locals are already participating in and are offering their premises for infrastructure deployment, forming local support groups in which they organize their participation, acquiring knowledge, skills and expertise on deploying and maintaining this infrastructure.
“The ID3 software, called Open Mustard Seed, wouldn’t just contain your name, home address, birthday, government tracking numbers, etc. It would also contain “biometric” and “behavioral” trackers, and all this data would be fused with every online transaction you ever used it for.
“This paper examines the intersection between Google’s desire to “database the world’s knowledge” and the many ways in which Google’s approach affects both the nature of the information users find and how they find it. The paper will argue that Google has monopolized the socially constructed nature of the World Wide Web; Benkler’s concept of social production will be used as an example of this process. Google capitalizes on the attention economy, using a combination of PageRank and personalization to dominate the search market. To do so, it must store and retain vast amounts of user data, this data being a representation of the cultural and social relations of Google users. By storing user data in “centralized” logs, Google’s approach to search opens up questions about how such sensitive data should be stored, and what the ownership of such a social ‘map’ by a private corporation means. To further establish the meaning of Google’s position this paper outlines the potential for new contrasting forms of search, that allocate more control to the user. In particular, this paper will analyze the Peer-to-Peer distributed search engine YaCy to see how it can alleviate the specific problems of various censorship and filtering that affects Google search results, and how it can address the wider issue of the private appropriation of social and cultural networks. This comparison of Google and Peer-to-Peer search will allow a clear view of the issues at stake as search is developed over the next decade, issues which will have resonating consequences on what information we receive.”
The Multitude movement enters a new era, where its processes can be supported by truly p2p infrastructures. Bitcoin is now a well-known symbol of a new breed of value exchange systems, called cryptocurrencies, money without the bank, stateless money, a new currency that looks and feels like your ATM card, but it is entirely decentralized, under the control of those who use it.
The Multitude movement enters a new era, where its processes can be supported by truly p2p infrastructures. Bitcoin is now a well-known symbol of a new breed of value exchange systems, called cryptocurrencies, money without the bank, stateless money, a new currency that looks and feels like your ATM card, but it is entirely decentralized, under the control of those who use it.
You do not escape the world of big corporates and big government by wishing for a trustless set of technologies that collectively resemble a technocratic crypto-sovereign. Rather, you use technology as a tool within ongoing political battles, and you maintain an ongoing critical outlook towards it. The concept of the decentralised blockchain is powerful. The cold, distrustful edge of cypherpunk, though, is only empowering when it is firmly in the service of creative warm-blooded human communities situated in the physical world of dirt and grime. Perhaps this means de-emphasising the focus on how blockchains can be used to store digital assets or property, and focusing rather on those without assets.
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