My pal David Pescovitz at the Institute for the Future blogged recently about the IFTF “Multiverse of Exploration Map,” an overview of the six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade:
“Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research.” A followup post includes a video of Luigi Anzivino from The Exploratorium talking about the relationship of magic and neuroscience.
With the decline of state capitalism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike.
Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne.
Al Jazeera, 15 February 2012
Click on Image to Enlarge
Chiang Mai, Thailand – “OH $%#@!”, reads the caption under the image depicting a group of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks and holding both humorous and denunciatory signs, “The internet is here”. The caption not only conveys the sentiment that drove US congressmen to drop their support of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) bills, but can also be said to summarise the analysis of the January 18 blackout by several of the most prominent media experts and scholars.
Larry Downes eloquently describes the January 18 events as “the dramatic introduction of bitroots politics”. In case the leaks, springs and occupations of 2011 left any room for doubt, the recognition of the internet as a political force in itself has moved from academic theoretical discussion to hard tangible reality. Lawrence Lessig portrays this sense of general underlying bewilderment by using the haunting metaphor of “a giant” when describing the web as a political force:
For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. And not just in a close fight: the power demonstrated by internet activists was wildly greater than the power Hollywood lobbyists could muster. They had awoken a giant. They had no clue about just how angry that giant could be.
However, the “January 18 blackout” victory guarantees “the internet” nothing. As Clay Shirky explained a few days before the blackout, rather than the end of this struggle, the SOPA/PIPA incident is just one chapter in the greater project of crippling the internet to eliminate its autonomy:
The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA [Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act], which was proposed last year, which did not pass. And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA [Digital Millenium Copyright Act] to disallow sharing as a technical means. And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. (…) PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming.
(PhysOrg.com) — In the United States, ultrafast trading in financial markets between 2006 and 2011 was the underlying factor for over 18,000 extreme price changes, according to a new study. Neil Johnson, a professor in the physics department of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, one of the authors of the study, thinks that a buildup of such “fractures” can destabilize the market. This study, “Financial Black Swans Driven by Ultrafast Machine Ecology” was submitted to arXiv earlier this month, suggesting the link between extreme-change fractures and market crashes.
Phi Beta Iota: Computational mathematics is light years ahead of government oversight, never mind the control fraud inherent in that putative oversight. Who is representing the public interest here? Nobody. This would be an excellent focus for the first true multinational multiagency intelligence and counterintelligence centre….however, such a centre would be even better if it were “whole.”
In my previous blog post on the use of drones for human rights, I also advocated for the use of drones to support nonviolent civil resistance efforts. Obviously, like the use of any technology in such contexts, doing so presents both new opportunities and obvious dangers. In this blog post, I consider the use of DIY drones in the context of civil resistance, both vis-a-vis theory and practice. While I've read the civil resistance literature rather widely for my dissertation, I decided to get input from two of the world's leading experts on the topic.
The first expert opined as follows: “Whether a given technology delivers strategic or tactical avantage is typically dependent on context. So to the extent that a drone can be useful in getting evidence that delegitimizes a movement's opponent (i.e. exposing atrocities), and/or legitimizes a movement (i.e. docu-menting strictly nonviolent activities), and/or provides useful intelligence to a movement about an opponent's current capabilities (i.e. the amount of supplies an adversary has), strengths, and weaknesses, then one could indeed argue that drones could provide strategic or tactical advantages. But contextually speaking, if the amount of human and financial resources necessary to acquire and deploy a drone are a drain on beneficial activities that a movement may otherwise be undertaking, then it's a cost/benefit analysis.”
Complexity and Reflexivity
