Monday 26 September 2011
by: Ron Boyer, Truthout | Interview
EXTRACT:
A few years later, with the nation plunged into what appears to be a sequel to the Great Depression and another presidential campaign season taking shape, signs of mass populist resistance to the global dominance of the robber-baron class are widely in evidence, both here and abroad. In this exclusive Truthout interview, the October2011 Coalition co-founder and physician Margaret Flowers discusses the conditions that helped bring this emerging movement of citizen activists into being and outlines the key differences between October2011's mission and that of superficially similar emerging “movements” such as Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream.
SOMETIMES, attention should be paid to the absence of news. America’s economic miseries continue, with unemployment still high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens is wider than it has been since the 1920s.
Knowledge is dispersed and shared. Friedrich Hayek was the first to point out, in his famous 1945 essay “The Uses of Knowledge in Society,” that central planning cannot work because it is trying to substitute an individual all-knowing intelligence for a distributed and fragmented system of localized but connected knowledge.
So dispersed is knowledge, that, as Leonard Reed famously observed in his 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” nobody on the planet knows how to make a pencil. The knowledge is dispersed among many thousands of graphite miners, lumberjacks, assembly line workers, ferrule designers, salesmen and so on. This is true of everything that I use in my everyday life, from my laptop to my shirt to my city. Nobody knows how to make it or to run it. Only the cloud knows.
One of the things I have tried to do in my book “The Rational Optimist” is to take this insight as far back into the past as I can—to try to understand when it first began to be true. When did human beings start to use collective rather than individual intelligence?
In doing so, I find that the entire field of anthropology and archaeology needs Hayek badly. Their debates about what made human beings successful, and what caused the explosive take-off of human culture in the past 100,000 years, simply never include the insight of dispersed knowledge. They are still looking for a miracle gene, or change in brain organization, that explains, like a deus ex machina, the human revolution. They are still looking inside human heads rather than between them.
Even a rather non-observant person would have noticed by now that the Occupy Wall Street protest is being ignored by the mainstream media, or at least not taken seriously. Corporate-owned media knows its masters well.
Phi Beta Iota: The Wall Street Occupation, now going into its second week, with many additional demonstrations planned across the USA for 6 October 2011, is being ignored by the elite and their media sock-puppets. This is one reason most do not realize that the “Day of Rage” is about electoral reform and a non-violent repossession of the US and the US Government.
As the avalanche of information coming through social networks and real-time tools like Twitter continues to grow, the need for filters to make sense of that tsunami of data also increases, and it seems as though everyone has a different way of trying to solve that problem. Facebook threw its hat into the ring this week with what it says is an improved “newspaper-style” news feed that highlights important content, while Digg has just launched “newsrooms” aimed at doing the same thing, and online influence-ranking service Klout is rolling out topic pages based on what’s being shared by those with influence. But will any of these be able to solve the filtering problem, or will they just add another source of noise?
Phi Beta Iota: Neither Google nor Facebook “get it” on the distinction between math hacks and stupid counters, and the nuanced capabilities of the human brain in networks that are in turn nuanced by time, space, and topic. The recent Facebook “make-over” has bombed. Google still does nothing to “make sense.”
Using Mobile Phones to Engage Citizen Scientists in Research
E. A. Graham, S. Henderson, and A. Schloss
[Abstract] [PDF]
Mobile phone–based tools have the potential to revolutionize the way citizen scientists are recruited and retained, facilitating a new type of “connected” citizen scientist—one who collects scientifically relevant data as part of his or her daily routine. Established citizen science programs collect information at local, regional, and continental scales to help answer diverse questions in the geosciences and environmental sciences. Hundreds of thousands of citizen scientists contribute to recurring research projects such as the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count, which drew more than 60,000 observers in 2009, or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Volunteer
Monitoring program, through which trained volunteers improve the monitoring of water quality in lakes and streams across the United States. These programs have relied on traditional recruiting techniques and written observations. New methods for engaging participants through technology, specifically, mobile applications, or apps, provide unprecedented ways for participants to have immediate access to their own and others’ observations and research results.
Phi Beta Iota: Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three. Real-time science is no longer a dream, it is a necessity. Governments and corporations as well as universities appear to be largely out of touch with the possibilities, but we do note that for years Taiwan has been paying a bounty to citizens who capture polluters in the act with a snapshot and GPS location.
Announcing a new Rheingold U course: Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation
For the past ten years, I've worked with Institute for the Future to track the emergence of a new story about how humans get things done together. The old story of survival of the fittest, competition, rational self-interest is changing as new knowledge comes to light about cooperative arrangements and complex interdependencies in cells, ecosystems, economies, and humans. In 2005, I delivered a TED talk about this subject; the video has been viewed more than 182,000 times. In the same year, I co-taught a seminar at Stanford with Andrea Saveri of Institute for the Future, “Toward a Literacy of Cooperation.” This six week Rheingold U course builds on the texts, videos, and other materials developed over the past ten years. Under my direction, co-learners will inquire, collaborate, discuss, co-construct knowledge about the building blocks and conceptual frames of a new literacy of cooperation. The course will run September 30 – November 11
This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.
We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.
Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.
We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.
We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.
We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.
If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.
And so we call on people to act
We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.
We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.
We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.