That made me think of the Emergent Democracy paper that Joi Ito authored collaboratively (2001-2003) with several other folks (including Ross Mayfield and I) a few years ago. Digging into my files I found the attached marked up version… it aligns pretty well with some of the discussions here.
There's been a lot of interesting thought about the Internet and the web as platform for enhanced social activity. That idea of “finding our tribes and ourselves” was a core aspect of FringeWare, the company/community that Paco Nathan and I started in 1991. We realized that like-minded fringe thinkers and doers were scattered everywhere, and the Internet gave us a platform where they could find each other and form community. All it took was an email list and a compelling concept (“fringeware”) to catalyze that community.
“Declaration of Interdependence” sounded familiar… I did some searching…
I continue to be focused on the future of the Internet and aware of divergent paths. In the later 2000s, following a period of digital and media convergence and given broad adoption of evolving high speed (broadband) network connectivity, the Internet has become an environment for mixed media and marketing. The Internet is increasingly centralized as a platform that serves a global business engine. It’s a mashup of business to business services and business to consumer connections, a mashup of all the forms of audio, text, and video communication and media in a new, more social/participatory context: the faceless consumer now has an avatar, an email address, and a feedback loop.
The sense of the Internet as a decentralized free and open space has changed, but there are still many advocates and strong arguments for approaches that are bottom-up, network-centric, free as in freedom (and sometimes as in beer), open, collaborative, decentralized. It’s tempting to see top-down corporate approaches vs bottom-up “free culture” approaches as mutually exclusive, but I think they can and will coexist. Rather than make value judgements about the different approaches, I want to support education and thinking about ethics, something I should discuss later.
Right now I want to point to a collaboration forming around the work of Venessa Miemis, who’s been curating trends, models, and projects associated with the decentralized Internet model. Venessa and her colleagues (including myself) have been discussing how to build a decentralized network that is broadly and cheaply accessible and that is more of a cooperative, serving the public interest rather than a narrower set of economic interests.
I’ll be focusing on these sorts of projects here and in my talks on the future of the Internet. Meanwhile, here are pointers to a couple of Venessa’s posts that are good overviews for what I’m talking about. I appreciate her clarity and focus.
Phi Beta Iota: A great deal of the credit goes to Doug Rushkoff, the originator of ContactCon, for whom Venessa Miemis (also a contributing editor here at Phi Beta Iota) works. Using Doug Rushkoff's social capital, and Venessa Miemi's inspired scouting on emergence, they have quickly become a hub for innovation and information sharing about the needed Autonomous Internet.
Cards on the table. I’ve been a “truther” since early 2002 when I came across the first major challenge to the official 9/11 story in the shape of the wonderful “Hunt the Boeing” site created by French researcher Thierry Meyssan. Until then I’d accepted the standard “Left” version of the government account – that a group of daring Muslims acting on behalf of the victims of US foreign policy had struck back at the great tyrant. The photographic and other evidence presented by Meyssan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that whatever it was that had caused the damage to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t a large Boeing jet. If the government’s story was a lie on that major point, then the whole story was brought into question. I knew at once that I had to find out as much as I could about the event which everyone was saying had “changed the world”.
. . . . . .
Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, hit the headlines just recently. He’d committed the cardinal sin of expressing doubts about the official story of 9/11 in a personal blog. The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, rushed to condemn him and demanded he be sacked. UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, joined in, saying that Falk’s remarks were “an affront to the memory of the more than 3000 people who died in that tragic attack”. Someone needs to remind the Secretary-General of the affront which gullible acceptance and repetition of the official lie of 9/11 causes to the memory of the more than 3 million dead and mutilated Afghan, Iraqi and now Pakistani men, women and children sacrificed on the altar of neo-imperialism as a direct consequence of the phoney ‘war on terror’ – based on the lie of 9/11 and the other false-flag crimes perpetrated for and/or by agencies of western governments.
Strangely enough, with all the nightmare scenario's currently playing out, their corollary, our best dreams are also playing out.
The stuff about being targeted and persecuted, shut-down etc. becomes irrelevant in the face of a few billion users who are able to leapfrog the existing infrastructure and communicate directly with one another. Meanwhile the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) would probably be happy to extend their wing for us to gather under.
The prolific depth of mobile phone access around the world, along with the radical decrease in cost of web capable devices, paints a picture of a planetary population about to demand an alternative method of communicating besides paying a monthly fee to some telco.
Cheap hardware plus electricity should equal communicative ability!
If we don't do it, some kid in Kinshasa will – well, she will, whether we do it or not.. maybe she already has.
There are also other discussions happening and the most relevant I see is this one:
Anon is having a brainstorming session on 14th April, all day, to discuss “a parallel internet”. You can find their IRC room at: irc.anonops.net #anonsec
In terms of sheer numbers of users and real world trial and error/lessons learned recently with the efforts to support Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, China using a variety of ‘darknet' and packet management techniques; there is a very compelling case for us all to attend.
This is a user community that would gravitate toward anything that worked ‘better' and are very capable of driving a meme into production.
In the end, everyone will gravitate to whatever works better. Slow and free with a prospect of getting much, much, faster is also qualified as being ‘better' by a growing population. Slow, free and available in the bush is also ‘better' for about four Billion people. Enough to start things off anyway. By the time it gets fast enough, Western consumers will gladly jump onboard.
Phi Beta Iota: Infinite free energy is close and will not be “locked up.” That will enable local to global clouds. Open Farm approach applied to Open Communications is going to take us the rest of the way, starting with OpenBTS (Range Networks).
As we become more comfortable with sharing ourselves on the ‘social web,’ we’re revealing a lot of valuable information about our interests, preferences and social connections, and it’s strewn across the web in many different 3rd party silos. One slice of me may be at home on Facebook, another segment of relationships and topics I follow are on Twitter, my online buying habits are known by Amazon and eBay, and a range of companies unknown to me are tracking the ‘digital exhaust’ I leave as I visit websites and travel around the web. There is a growing recognition of the value of all this data to assist us in decision-making, and a concern about who owns it currrently and what’s being done with it.
According to a recent W3C report, there are at least 4 main issues that arise when our data is trapped in 3rd party walled gardens:
1. Portability – The option of taking my personal information and social connections with me across any platform or marketplace is unavailable to me, so I’m forced to reenter and duplicate my data over and over again on different websites.
2. Identity – Instead of having a federated identity that is secure and interoperable across any website, I have an overwhelming (and growing) amount of usernames, passwords and accounts, making my online identity fractured and fragmented.
3. Linkability – People may be mentioning me or sharing photos of me on networks in which I am not a member, making that information invisible to me.
4. Privacy – Once I upload or add content to a site, I have no way of controlling the context of how it’s shared or creating permissions for what can be done with it.
In light of these concerns, I’ve been exploring the emerging tools and solutions for personal data ownership, unified online identity, and a federated social web that puts the user at the center of their online experience.
One of the recurring themes I’ve seen is the call for “personal data stores” or “personal data lockers.” This is the idea of a database that would store all of your personal information. The range of its functionality varies, but here is a comprehensive overview of what it could entail (from Mydex site):
Data Storage – a single access point for my information that is currently scattered
Data Management – a toolset for analyzing and understanding what my data means
Data Sharing – the ability to choose how to share my information and with whom
Data Collection – the ability to track my purchases, preferences, and activities
Verifications – the ability to authenticate sensitive information generated by 3rd parties
Identity Assurance – the ability to prove I am who I say I am
Privacy Management – my info has a privacy setting determined by me, not organizations
Manage Permissions – deciding the communication channels between me & my contacts
Express Interests & Intentions – the ability to announce what I want to buy, do or access
Plan & Implement Projects – a life management system for how I use my info over time
Below is a list I’ve been assembling of startups, open source projects, organizations, and standards that are defining what this next stage of the web will look like, where individuals are empowered by the ownership and understanding of their data and ability to verify identity. I’ve done my best to organize these, but am open for suggestions of how to arrange the list more usefully. And as always, if I’ve missed some vital information, please add to the comments section and I’ll keep the post updated.
For the second time, Icelanders voted down a deal to repay Britain and the Netherlands billions of euros lost in the island nation's 2008 financial collapse—at once a bold popular rejection of the notion that taxpayers must bear the burden for bankers' woes and a risky outcome that will complicate Iceland's efforts to rejoin global markets.
Whether consciously or not, most of us subscribe to a PC-centric view of the Internet, in which everything revolves around content that is created or accessed via a PC or Mac. However, that is about to change as mobile increasingly becomes the new paradigm for both creating and consuming content. Quite simply, the Web is about to experience a Copernican moment. Before Copernicus, it was widely believed that everything – including the Sun – revolved around the Earth, rather than the Earth revolving around the Sun. In the same way, it might be quaint one day to believe that everything once revolved around the PC rather than the mobile device.
The easiest way to understand this Copernican moment is to understand the extent to which mobile is becoming the new paradigm for the way we use the Internet. In terms of hours of usage, total content consumed and amount of data created, 2010 was the year of the mobile device. Keep in mind that the average teen now sends more than 3000 text messages each month! And that trend is only accelerating in 2011 as social networking rapidly migrates to the mobile device.
