Patrick Meier: Resilience in Anarchy? Anarchy vs. Panarchy?

Politics
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Resilience = Anarchism = Resilience?

Resilience is often defined as the capacity for self-organization, which in essence is cooperation without hierarchy. In turn, such cooperation implies mutuality; reciprocation, mutual dependence. This is what the French politician, philo-sopher, economist and socialist “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon had in mind when he first used the term ‘anarchism,’ namely, mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule” (1).

As renowned Yale Professor James Scott explains in his latest bookTwo Cheers for Anarchism, “Forms of informal cooperation, coordination, and action that embody mutuality without hierarchy are the quotidian experience of most people.” To be sure, “most villages and neighborhoods function precisely be-cause of the informal, transient networks of coordination that do not require formal organization, let alone hierarchy. In other words, the experience of anar-chistic mutuality is ubiquitous.”

The existence, power and reach of the nation-state over the centuries may have undermined the self-organizing capacity (and hence resilience) of individuals and small communities. Indeed, “so many functions that were once accomplished by mutuality among equals and informal coordination are now state organized or state supervised.” In other words, “the state, arguably, destroys the natural initiative and responsibility that arise from voluntary cooperation.”

This is goes to the heart what James Scott argues in his new book, which he does  in a very compelling manner. Says Scott: “I am suggesting that two centuries of a strong state and liberal economies may have socialized us so that we have largely lost the habits of mutuality and are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature. Leviathan may have given birth to its own justification.” And yet, we also see a very different picture of reality, one in which solidarity thrives and mutual-aid remains the norm: we see this reality surface over & over during major disasters—a reality facilitated by mobile technology and social media networks.

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Cory A. Booker of Newark: Politician From and For the Future? Data-Driven, Interactive, Separating from Party Dogma?

Politics

cary A Politician From the Future

Anand Giridharadas

New York Times, 22 March 2013

Cory A. Booker is hoping to be the next U.S. senator from New Jersey. But the constituency he seems keenest to represent is the future itself.

Perhaps more than any prominent American politician, Mr. Booker — the 43-year-old Democrat and mayor of the rust-coated, luck-starved city of Newark — has cultivated his brand as a leader of, by and for a new era.

He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat, so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.

Educated at Stanford, Oxford and Yale, Mr. Booker is a model of self-propelled ascent in a postindustrial city where rises like his have grown ever rarer. In conversation, he might cite the writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes; Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction; the business book “Built to Last”; ancient Roman history; and an African proverb about going fast alone but far together. Owing in part to the gap between his own sophistication and the travails of the city he has led since 2006, he has endured ceaseless speculation about whether Newark is merely a steppingstone.

Now, as he turns his attention to a U.S. Senate race in 2014, the more interesting question may be whether a self-styled politician from the future can make it to the Washington of right now — and what a city of marble, pearls and power ties might make of him.

Even as the Republican Party undergoes a time of soul-searching, self-flagellation and contestation, Mr. Booker’s emergence hints at schisms to come among Democrats. He represents the Googly-Facebookish wing of the party — liberal as ever in its views on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but more libertarian than the old guard on economics, more trusting of markets than unions to improve lives, more reliant on the business jargon of “synergy” and “scale” than the language of activism and justice.

Mr. Booker sounds like a new kind of Democrat, for example, when he says that running Newark has made him trust data more than his own liberal principles on the issue of reducing gun violence.

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Michel Bauwens: Citizens Engaged in Participatory Democracy

Politics
Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

Citizens engaged in participatory democracy

(05 March 2013) – A Flash Eurobarometer measuring citizens’ engagement shows that Europeans trust civil society organisations to influence policies and make a difference in the life of their communities.

While Europe faces economic and social challenges, EU citizens continue to involve themselves in participatory democracy activities, including signing petitions and becoming active members of non-governmental organisations, mainly at local and national level.

citizens in participatory democracyA majority (59%) of people think non-governmental organisations share their interests and values. A majority of respondents (54%) think that voting in EU elections or joining an NGO can influence political decision-making and even more respondents (7 out of 10) think that voting in local or national elections is an effective way to influence political decisions.

A third (34%) of respondents say that they have signed a petition in the last two years. 24% have conveyed their views on public issues to an elected representative at local/regional level, 10% at national level and 4% at EU level.

Download the report

Berto Jongman: Free MindShift Seminar Online with Craig Hamilton

Culture, Education, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Transparency
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

FREE ONLINE BOTH LIVE AND AS DOWNLOADABLE RECORDING

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Michel Bauwens: 3D Printing Merging Physical and Digital

Innovation, Knowledge, Manufacturing, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

As posted by Jean Lievens to Peer2Politics.

3D printing provides an opportunity to change the way we think about the world around us. [1] It merges the physical and the digital. People on opposite sides of the globe can collaborate on designing an object and print out identical prototypes every step of the way. Instead of purchasing one of a million identical objects built in a faraway factory, users can customize pre-designed objects and print them out at home. Just as computers have allowed us to become makers of movies, writers of articles, and creators of music, 3D printers allow everyone to become creators of things.

What's the Deal with Copyright and 3D Printing?

January 29, 2013

This whitepaper is also available as a PDF and can be purchased on the Amazon Kindle Store.

EXTRACT

Ultimately then, the burden is on the community and the organizations that host the community not to blindly assume that copyright covers everything. This is not to say that copyright should be rejected, or that legal orders should be ignored. Instead, it is a reminder of the value of healthy skepticism. If someone is asserting copyright over an object, take a moment to consider if copyright can even apply in that case. Make assertions of infringement public so that the wider community can understand who is claiming what kinds of rights.

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Phi Beta Iota:  Of scholastic quality and densely footnotes, this is a formidable review of copyright, 3D printing, and community culture.

Theophillis Goodyear: Subprime Mortgage — Open Source Could Have Prevented, but Various Information Pathologies (Corruption of Government Being One of Them) Enabled the Fraud

Commerce, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, Law Enforcement, Politics
Theophillis Goodyear
Theophillis Goodyear

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A Perfect Example of the Potential Benefits of Open-Source Governance in the Real World

The article: The Nature and Origin of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, (San Jose State University Department of Economics) says,”The guilt for the subprime mortgage financial crisis lies both with the lenders who knowingly put borrowers into booby trapped mortgages and the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for making a market for such booby trapped mortgages thus giving the lenders the incentive for writing them.”

The article goes on to say, “It seems that everyone but the dimwits running Fannie Mae (into the ground) understood intuitively that a poor risk for a mortgage cannot be made a better risk by charging a higher interest rate.”

Of course its a complex problem, with many parties to blame (the article goes on to say). But if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been required to post their data online where the general public could access it, some citizen would have seen the mortgage crisis coming. And if there had been an open-source forum where they could drawn attention to the problem, and an open-source vehicle for proposing a solution, or at least writing up some kind of formal complaint to the government, then the disaster might have been averted before it grew so immense.

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Owl: Why the Elite Would Lose a Civil War

Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience
Who?  Who?
Who? Who?

Why The Elite Would Lose a Civil War

“Despite the fact that the banking elite wants to generate riots and stir social disorder in order to collapse the U.S. economy so they can buy up real assets on the cheap, if such chaos was to spill over into a full blown civil war, the consequences for the technocrats would be disastrous… In reality, even if a tiny minority of armed Americans chose to resist government oppression – the odds would be stacked hugely in their favor. Consider the fact that there are almost 100 million gun owners in the United States, who in total own over 300 million firearms and rising. There are only around 1.4 million active duty personnel in the entire US military – that includes the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Even if you include national guard reserves, the total figure is less than 2.3 million. Even if just five per cent of American gun owners actively resisted in a civil war, that would be five million Americans – more than double the entire US military and national guard, many of whom are already engaged overseas. So even if the government used the military to fire upon U.S. citizens, the troops would be easily outnumbered.”

This part of the article reminds one of John Robb's super-empowered global guerilla*:

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