Peer2Politics

Excerpted from a transcript of a lecture by Moglen in New Delhi, India (“Software Patents and the Commons”), by Tech Chords: Eben Moglen: “In the 21st century though, the economies of scale of the hierarchical production don’t quite work. Moglen believes that digital culture and digital economic life do not reward economies of scale. They …

Excerpted from William Irwin Thompson: “DECENTRALIZATION of cities and the miniaturization of technology will alter the center-periphery dialectic of traditional civilization and make a whole new cultural level possible. What will take place in the metaindustrial village will be that the four classical economies of human history, hunting and gathering, agriculture, industry, and cybernetics, will …

Technology for big computers, electric cars and high-technology microcontrollers to operate things like power tools and engines is now given away. These ideas used to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. To the new generation of technologists, however, moving projects and data fast overrides the value of making everything in secret. Excerpted from …

Excerpted from Marc Chataigner:
“Technology is a specific set of know-how and habits that will shape the way you interact with the world surrounding you, thus shape the way you see the world.

Tufekci: Autocratic regimes don’t stay in power for decades by governing randomly; rather, they do so by following a tried-and-tested playbook of strategic censorship, isolation and repression of dissent. And control over information flows and the public sphere is a key element of this model of autocratic regime. Regimes in the Middle East actively sought to prevent and control the spread of information because they understood that keeping sparks of dissent from lighting prairie fires of uprisings was crucial. Dissidents were punished disproportionately – long prison sentence for the smallest offenses, torture — not just because the security forces happened to be composed of sadists, but because of the same problem: to prevent cascades of dissent from taking off. The Internet has opened up the public sphere; it has allowed citizens to express their views and coordinate with each other. Does that always lead to revolution? No, you need the dissent to be there on the ground. But it does mean that such that regimes cannot continue to govern as before. They are forced to play a new game.

“Many of the brand-name gizmos that we associate with the Internet age—iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and Google—are indeed formidable tools for distraction, extraction and surveillance. But these are not, in fact, our only options. This month in The New Republic, I propose a different way: “Slow Computing.”

“Should we fear or welcome the internet’s evolution? The latest smart televisions now watch us, and report on our behavior to their manufacturers. If you don’t pay the bills on your car loan, the bank may shut down your car while you are hiking in a park. The latest pacemaker may save your life, but the data on your heartbeats doesn’t belong to you or your doctor. Recently, a refrigerator was caught sending spam. The “internet of things” is made up of device networks–connected objects—eyeglasses, cows, thermostats—with sensors and internet addresses.

Breaking The Frame is a growing network, which aims to democratise decisions about technology. We are bringing together different campaigns in order to learn from each others’ experience and strengthen our work. They explain: “Breaking the Frame started around the Breaking the Frame Gathering in 2014, aimed at a deeper understanding of the politics of …

Technology for big computers, electric cars and high-technology microcontrollers to operate things like power tools and engines is now given away. These ideas used to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. To the new generation of technologists, however, moving projects and data fast overrides the value of making everything in secret. Excerpted from …

You may think that, in order to free yourself from that specific way to see the world, you should free yourself from technology ; you’ll be partly right, only partly, because without any set of given technology, a human cannot perceive nor interact much with the world around him.

We are all hackers now, apparently—or are trying to be. Guilty as charged. I am writing these words, as I write most things, not with a pen and paper, or a commercial word processor, but on Emacs, a command-line text editor first developed in the 1970s for that early generation of free-software hackers. I had to hack it, so to speak, with a few crude lines of scripting code in order that it would properly serve my purposes as a writer. And it does so extremely well, with only simple text files, an integrated interpreter for the Markdown markup language, and as many split screens as I want. I get to feel clever and devious every time I sit down to use it.