Category: Ethics

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Michel Bauwens: Knowing Networks as an Alternative to Closed Networks

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics
Michel Bauwens

Phi Beta Iota:  This is one of the most elegant trenchant discussions we have seen on the imperatives for arriving at collective intelligence through open methods.   The entire contribution is below the line.

Debating the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Power Law: Knowing Networks as an alternative to scale-free networks

Franco Iacomella, 2nd May 2012

These are further elements to the debate (between Zeynep Tufekci and others) as to whether and how the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which affects initially egalitarian distributed networks, can be countered.

1. Clay Shirky: inequality is not always unfair

Classic discusion of how the power law operates in blogs, and why it is inevitable, by one of the most influential commentators, by Clay Shirky.

“A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.”

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Knowing Networks as an Alternative to Closed Networks”

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Marcus Aurelius: Polish Lid Comes Off Global Rendition-Torture Pot

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement
Marcus Aurelius
The New York Times

  •       
March 27, 2012
By JOANNA BERENDT and

WARSAW — The former head of Poland’s intelligence service has been charged with aiding the Central Intelligence Agency in setting up a secret prison to detain suspected members of Al Qaeda, a leading newspaper here reported on Tuesday, the first high-profile case in which a former senior official of any government has been prosecuted in connection with the agency’s program.

The daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the former intelligence chief, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, told the paper that he faced charges of violating international law by “unlawfully depriving prisoners of their liberty,” in connection with the secret C.I.A. prison where Qaeda suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation methods.

When President Obama took office in 2009, he said he wanted to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward” and rejected calls for a broad investigation of C.I.A. interrogations and other Bush administration counterterrorism programs. In sharp contrast, the Poles see the case as a crucial test for rule of law and the investigation by prosecutors here has reached the highest levels of Polish politics.

One of Poland’s prime ministers during the period when terrorism suspects were alleged to have been subjected to torture in Poland, Leszek Miller, could be charged before Poland’s State Tribunal, the newspaper said.

“We try to treat our Constitution seriously and try not to forget the fact that there was a manifest violation of the Polish Constitution within the country’s borders,” said Adam Bodnar, vice president of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, based in Warsaw.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  There is nothing honorable, patriotic, or even intelligent about rendition and torture (or the drone program managed by CIA)  All those US citizens who can be identified by foreign governments as participants in the rendition and torture programs or the drone programs would be well advised to avoid any foreign travel lest they be arrested and charged for crimes against humanity.  Poland–like Iceland against financial terrorism–is on the right path.

See Also:

Robert Steele: Waterboarding Morons — A Social Cancer

Bin Laden Show 59: Waterboarding for Morons Part II–Senator John McCain Gets Explicit “NO–N, O”

Bin Laden Show 55: Waterboarding for Morons

Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–On Torture–While Obama Signs Law Blocking Release of Torture Photos

Former CIA Director, Former CIA Counterterrorism Director, 31 Other Intelligence Experts Announce Support for McCain Anti-Torture Amendment to Defense Bill

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John Robb: Techcrunch Interview on Resilient Communities (Be Happy)

Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Future-Oriented, Methods & Process, Policies, Resilience
John Robb

Techcrunch Interview

Posted: 28 Apr 2012 10:15 AM PDT

I did an interview the Jon Evans at Techcrunch (the social technology hub) earlier this week.  Here it is.

I'm spending most of my time writing and editing the Resilient Communities letter (it's free to subscribe).

As I said in the interview, the reason I started the letter was because I strongly believe that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.

Lots of good stuff in the RC letter —  from DiY sewage systems to how to power an entire neighborhood with solar energy.

Phi Beta Iota:  Creating resilient communities from the bottom up is what the federal government should be but is not facilitating.  We're on our own.

See Also:

Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (Columbia University Press, 1990)

Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New Catalyst Books, 2007)

E. F. Schumaker, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Hartley and Marks Publishers, 2000)

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NIGHTWATCH: China Builds Economic-Tourism Bridge to Taiwan, Puts PLA Into a Box – US Will Continue to Demonize China for Unethical Reasons

02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence

Sixteen years ago, Pingtan Island, just north west of Taiwan, was the center of Chinese military energies to intimidate Taiwanese voters against electing a pro-independence president. Major amphibious operations were staged, some with catastrophic loss of life by military personnel because of bad weather. This also was the first time China attempted to maintain continuous air operations over the Taiwan Strait. That also proved beyond Chinese capabilities.

These complemented the dramatic and sensational Chinese short range ballistic missile shots into Taiwan's two main ports. The missile launches might be compared to the US launching missiles into Pearl Harbor to prevent Hawaii from seceding from the US.

A key difference was that the Chinese missiles were so inaccurate, that no one knew whether they would launch much less whether they would stay on target. The danger was that a ballistic missile might veer off course and strike Taiwan, rather than the ocean. The missiles were so unreliable that the risk of a stray missile was very real. With only luck, they did not hit land or ships in the harbor which would have sparked general war in 1996.

The US sent two aircraft carrier task groups to defend Taiwan in 1996, forcing the Chinese to back down and inflicting a humiliating political defeat on the communist mandarins in Beijing. At one point, during turnover, three carriers were present to defend Taiwan. The Chinese intimidation effort failed on every level. Even the weather was hostile to the Chinese.

This week China published details of its plans for the Pingtan Comprehensive Economic Zone (CEZ) through the approval and promulgation of the General Development Plan for the Pingtan CEZ. Mainland China officials have emphasized the “importance” of the plan and the CEZ.

The Chinese military fiasco during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis ensured that the communist party leaders would never again allow the People's Liberation Army leaders to have their way in solving any national security problems.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: China Builds Economic-Tourism Bridge to Taiwan, Puts PLA Into a Box – US Will Continue to Demonize China for Unethical Reasons”

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Patrick Meier: Civil Resistance 2.0 – A New Database on Non-Violent Guerrilla Warfare

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics
Patrick Meier

Civil Resistance 2.0: A New Database on Non-Violent Guerrilla Warfare

Gene Sharp pioneered the study of nonviolent civil resistance. Some argue that his books were instrumental to the success of activists in a number of revolutions over the past 20 years ranging from the overthrow of Milosevic to ousting of Mubarak. Civil resistance has often been referred to as “nonviolent guerrilla warfare” and Sharp’s manual on “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” for example, includes a list of 198 methods that activists can use to actively disrupt a repressive regime. These methods are divided into three sections: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.

While Sharp’s 198 are still as relevant today as they were some 40 years ago, the technology space has changed radically. In Sharp’s “Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts” published in 2012, Gene writes that “a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.” About four years ago, I began to think about how technology could extend Sharp’s methods and possibly generate entirely new methods as well. This blog post was my first attempt at thinking this through and while it was my intention to develop the ideas further for my dissertation, my academic focus shifted somewhat.

With the PhD out of the way, my colleague Mary Joyce suggested we launch a research project to explore how Sharp’s methods can and are being extended as a result of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The time was ripe for this kind of research so we spent the past few months building a database of civil resistance methods 2.0 based on Sharp’s original list. We also consulted a number of experts in the field to help us populate this online database. We decided not to restrict the focus of this research  to ICTs only–i.e., any type of technology qualifies, such as drones, for example.

This database will be an ongoing initiative and certainly a live document since we’ll be crowdsourcing further input. In laying the foundations for this database, we’ve realized once again just how important creativity is when thinking about civil resistance. Advances in technology and increasing access to technology provides fertile ground for the kind of creativity that is key to making civil resistance successful.

We invite you to contribute your creativity to this database and share the link (bit.ly/CivRes20) widely with your own networks. We’ve added some content, but there is still a long way to go. Please share any clever uses of technology that you’ve come across that have or could be applied to civil resistance by adding them.

Our goal is to provide activists with a go-to resource where they can browse through lists of technology-assisted methods to inform their own efforts. In the future, we envision taking the database a step further by considering what sequencing of said methods are most effective.

Phi Beta Iota:  We continue to believe that the fastest — and perhaps the only near-term and non-violent — means to restore the Republic and restore democracy as well as moral capitalism in the USA is an Electoral Reform Summit that demands of our two-party corrupt Congress the Electoral Reform Act of 2012.  Learn more at We the People Reform Coalition.

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John Steiner: Tea Party & Occupy Finding Common Ground — Will They – And Independents and the Little Disenfranchised Parties – Converge in Time?

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
John Steiner

This morning I got this note from Co-Intelligence Institute board member Lyn Manju Bazzell, who lives in Ashland, a town in southern Oregon's Rogue Valley:

“A little news from the Rogue Valley:  went to a meeting with 200 people last night.  It was a panel of 2 Tea Party leaders and 2 Occupy leaders in the Rogue Valley answering questions from the audience. A very positive move for our area!  Jeff Golden put it together with some help and there is a desire for ongoing conversations for the Rogue Valley. It is an outgrowth of one of  his Immense Possibilities episodes that included these 4 people. Yea for Jeff  – he's a mensch!

“Here are some areas of common ground that were shared by the panel:  Personal liberty issues; Homeland Security; Election reform – concern about voting machines; lobbying; self-reliance; importance of local action; concentration of power in the hands of the elites (a bit of difference re: who is really holding the power, with the Tea Party focused on government and Occupy on big business, but the identification of lobbying as an issues offers an open window into a deeper discussion; size of the military and our aggressive global orientation (this was a surprise to me for Tea Partiers).”

An hour later I received the following article from Lance Bisaccia:

Tea party, Occupy supporters find they have many similarities

Two groups come together at forum; avoid ‘hot debate'
By John Darling for the Tidings Posted: 2:00 AM April 24, 2012

In their first public outing together, tea party and Occupy backers — and an audience of 200 — found a lot of common ground on the issue that corporations, lobbyists, the military and the federal government have a huge amount of power, are “bought” — and aren't very responsive to the needs of the average person.