Birth of the global mind

because of copyright issues i only share the link of this fantastic article :)

here it is : http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a4bce7e8-e32b-11e0-bb55-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1cMr7wL5K

A new culture of resistance: from WikiLeaks to the squares

A new culture of resistance: from WikiLeaks to the squares

By Pedro Noel On November 11, 2011


The grassroots movement that started with the Arab Spring has, for the first time in history, made global civil society fully aware of itself and its power.


occup
By Pedro Noel and Santiago Carrion

Now that the grassroots movement that started inadvertently with the Arab Spring has gone global, it is necessary to cast a backwards glance to try and figure out, with some perspective, the dynamics of what has happened, physically and conceptually, over the last year. We propose a simple vision of the process of uprising in 2011, which was consolidated on the past 15th of October as a new culture of popular resistance and creativity. We also aim to point out the recent or enhanced concepts born in the collective consciousness of society during this period.

Wikileaks and the Unmasking of the Global System

Considered the most dangerous website in the world by the end of 2010, Wikileaks.org posed a serious challenge to the global political establishment. Even though the organization had been active in leaking content since 2006, the release of the Collateral Murder video in March of 2010 made ‘Wikileaks’ the most searched for term on search engines, and brought them to the forefront of mass media interest. The classified video, taken from the cockpit of a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad, depicts the slaying of around twelve people, including two Reuters journalists whose cameras were ‘mistaken’ for AK-47s. After the first round of fire, one of them starts crawling toward shelter when an unmarked van appears to rescue him. Then, even though there was no weapon visible, the soldiers opened fire, executing the journalist, wounding two children in the truck, and killing their father. Hence the title ‘Collateral Murder’.

In barely a few months, the organization followed up with the release of 100,000 classified U.S. files on the Afghanistan war, proving widespread war and the efforts made to hide them. As the organization grew in prestige, their new role as a prominent force of change culminated in November with another historical leak described by philosopher Slavoj Žižek with an excellent metaphor: the emperor had been standing naked for a long time — global society has been living a dramatic period of financial and ideological crisis since at least 2008 — and Wikileaks was the one to stand up and point it out, adding documents to prove their claim. This time nobody laughed, people rose up.

The constant connections made between Wikileaks and the Tunisian uprising are not just a coincidence. Barka, a prominent member of a Tunisian association for female equality, told us that “the Wikileaks revelations circulated very well in Tunisia in January [2011].” She also confirmed that local newspapers were publishing Cablegate analysis at the beginning of the year, prior to the revolution. She considers that the airing of the material on the mainstream media, revealing just how rotten Ben Ali’s crony-capitalist system was, played a significant role in politically engaging the youth of the country.

We do not want to make it seem, as some have, that Wikileaks was the only cause for the uprising in Tunisia. Even though we acknowledge that their success had a moderate role in fueling the subsequent Arab Spring, we believe it played an incredibly important one in shaping the global audience’s understanding of what happened. People following the process worldwide made the connection easily. To a large extent, the media made it for them, as both stories were unfolding at the same time in a seemingly simple cause-and-effect format. This assimilation of the events was to prove critical in the following months, as more and more countries saw their leaders knee deep in corruption.

The Squares: Camping as a Form of Protest

In March, in the town of Ergueb, in the rural province of Sidi Boussid, birthplace of the Tunisian Revolution, a man camped out in front of the local government building. He said he would only leave once he got a job. He is an example of occupation in the very place where the global uprising took off. Afterwards, events of the same nature, albeit with different results and objectives, started popping up across North Africa and the Middle East. Egypt was the next to topple a dictator and soon enough Tahrir Square (Freedom Square in Arabic) became an emblem of popular struggles. The same model was later exported to Puerta del Sol in Madrid as it spread across Spain, then Europe, and finally to North America, where Occupy Wall Street took the protest to the physical heart of the issue. The bold move received widespread support in the US. As other cities followed their lead, and the media began paying attention, the movement went viral.

The will to re-appropriate the physical center of the polis — the ancient heart of politics — is deeply related to the impulse to engage with fellow humans, and is irrevocably linked with the concept of transparency. The new squares are the place to apprehend reality, a piece of land where there is no space for the administrative control of information. The square has once again returned to its role as a place of exchange for individual initiatives, art and politics.



In this sense, public squares have become the physical antagonists of government and corporate conspiracies. This is proven by the brutal repression of the state security forces that didn’t allow this kind of protest to continue in African or Middle Eastern countries. Syrians are still being massacred for demanding their rights. On October 15th, twelve Yemenis were killed, and early on in Zimbabwe a group of teachers was arrested and tortured for showing videos of the Egyptian uprising. Despite the strong repression, peaceful protesters have continued to demand their rights. The movement took root and set an example for the popular uprising in Spain that started on the 15th of May, 2011. In a very significant gesture, the only national flag hanging in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid during the month it was occupied was the Egyptian flag.

Hive Minds: Popular Assemblies and Direct Democracy

As a place to experience the re-creation of social content, the occupied squares of 2011 opened the way to experiment with new kinds of political interaction: the occupation works as a hive mind of resistance against the cybernetic system. In their search for public participation, the squares, which no longer tolerated intermediaries between people, established a more harmonic, tolerant and democratic relationship with each other. This, together with the pulse for political renewal, crystallized into the idea of ‘real democracy’.

A model of decentralized, horizontal, and not politically preconceived assemblies spread organically to around 300 squares in Spain in the weeks after the 15th of May. Their aim was to create a system of self-governance based on participative democracy, where everyone had an equal say on the issues that affected them. This was a radical shift from the representative democracy they deemed flawed to the core. As they saw it, elected leaders had betrayed the people’s recognized sovereignty by siding with the financial elites, instead of defending social interests. They also recognized that this severe legitimation crisis (various polls set the public support level for the movement at 70%) could not be translated into reform, as there is no democratic control of leaders or institutions after elections. The collective spirit that was awakened in the camps could not find a way to express itself in the outdated Spanish system, making the lateral process flourish as people poured their energy into creating politics, as opposed to political discourse based on hollow ideas, old character types and anachronisms. Slowly but surely the assemblies starting working to build a truly legitimate way for political interaction, based on horizontality and common decision-making. This also meant that the old dichotomy of left and right was finally transcended, as ideology was to be built inside the autonomous space created inside the assembly.



At the same time, many other small activist groups (who already used this method) tied in neatly, and the assemblies acted as an amplifier for these already organized voices. In Spain, direct action platforms such as the PAH (literally Plaftorm of Mortgate Victims, which was already working before May 15th) began forming local nodes within each assembly. The Platform organized flash mobs in front of the homes of families who were about to be evicted when the public inspector was scheduled to arrive. If successful, the inspector would be unable to enter the building, making it impossible for him to effect his orders, which would revert the process back to the judge who issued the order. With this technique, the indignados have managed to stop hundreds of evictions from taking place all across the country. Their actions have become so integrated into the movement that a recently occupied hotel is serving, after the due consensus, to reallocate people who have been evicted. Our prediction is that this process of amplification will repeat itself wherever the assembly-based method takes root, serving to change attitudes towards humanitarian projects and a variety of social organizations.

Soon this method spread to the rest of Europe and finally to the USA, where hundreds of camps and even more assemblies have taken root in recent months. It is safe to say that nowadays, periodical gatherings of the same type occur in perhaps thousands of squares in different countries across the globe. This has brought a generalized shift in civilian attitudes, marking a return to contentious politics. In this sense, squares and assemblies propose more than a transgression: they are a transcendence of political legitimacy. In these squares, creative commons, autonomy, sustainability and transparency are applied to urban reality and communitarian decisions. They are an experiment of direct democracy as a method for free political articulation among people, an afffirmation of existence, and a reaction to the political structures of contemporary society.

Cyber Occupation: The New Dynamics of Social Uprisings

This rethinking of public space that began in Tahrir Square can also be postulated in terms of social cybernetics. In The Self-Organizing Polity (1988), Peter Harries-Jones observed some of the key factors of what he called ‘new cybernetics’ and its relation to political science: “unlike its predecessor, the new cybernetics concerns itself with the interaction of autonomous political actors and subgroups, and the practical and reflexive consciousness of the subjects who produce and reproduce the structure of a political community.” One of the other main intellectuals behind new cybernetics in the 1990s, Kenneth D. Bailey, added that this concept “views information as constructed and reconstructed by an individual interacting with the environment,” which in turn reduces the gap between the individual and the social system as a whole. We believe that this process has come to a high point in history during the last year, serving to create a massive collective consciousness, now oriented towards systemic transformation.

In this specific context, we propose the term cyber occupying, which is inevitably linked with the new culture of resistance, as the appropriation of society’s virtual and physical systemics. At first, this concentration of resistance continued to be in the streets and public spaces, although much of its recent success is, according to Max Rousseau, due to the idea of “physical immobility”. In this sense, it means that “the simple but prolonged collective presence in a public place can be an action of resistance.” By occupying the traditional channels of information exchange (both physical and virtual), a resistance is built against the flow which normally serves to aid and perpetuate the established systems of society. Cyber occupation is based on the prolonged permanence and concentration on strategic spots of informative, political, behavioral or monetary flow (among others).



Rousseau also argues that this new form of protest is born from a resistance to the reduction of the social system’s space and time via the modernization of technology. Therefore, we can see it as a reaction to capitalist dynamics, which implies rapid transformation and movement. Not only do the new occupations work as blockades of the ‘healthy’ systemic flow of information of contemporary society, they also serve as an impulse towards autonomy from these rules in order to partially recreate reality. As a result, most occupied squares became temporary autonomous zones, experiments in collaborative administration that operated in a parallel plane to the system. They actually serve as forces of outward change from within: they are recursive. Thus their attitude is both resistant and creative, as well as adapted to 21st century urban life.

In this light, the term “Occupation” has a broader meaning than it did before. An #occupation can be carried out by one or two million people, as well as by one person, as long as they share the spirit of taking back society’s functional centers, which can be squares, parliaments, bridges, avenues, public transport, or even websites and online feeds. After the 15th of October, the #occupy spirit grew exponentially: people understood all these concepts intuitively, to the point where they started considering the #occupation not only of physical space but also of abstract ideas such as social media, private companies or even voting booths.

Anonymous and the Occupation of Online Space

All the events narrated above co-existed with an important process of change in Internet dynamics regarding political activism, which can be understood as the #occupation of online space. The politicized role that the Anonymous collectiveundertook to defend Wikileaks in 2010 marked the beginning of a parallel hacktivist movement on the Internet. Anonymous is the virtual culmination of the same organizing principles practiced in the squares: they are completely open (in a strange way, you don’t have to know you are a member to be one), decisions are taken horizontally and in a highly decentralized structure.

In late 2010, Anonymous began to coordinate the shutting down of websites that were boycotting Wikileaksusing their trademark DDoS attack. In a few weeks, ‘Operation Payback’ managed to take down the virtual spaces of Amazon, Mastercard and Paypal, who had unilaterally broken agreements to handle donations made to Wikileaks, freezing their assets and making them lose estimated millions of dollars. When the uprisings in North Africa started, Anonymous and various other hacktivist groups defaced and shut down websites related to the Egyptian and Tunisian governments, who were censoring and repressing their citizens. This connection with the movement has proved to be long-lasting, as local hacktivist groups have immediately backed the occupations as they reached their countries. This tendency has continued to expand as the organization merged with others and diversified, until it became hard to keep track of everybody’s actions (a good source for information on this topic is http://thehackernews.com).

At the same time, the people’s freshly tuned moral compass, at its height of awareness during the Cablegate revelations, took over social networking sites, mainly Facebook (800 million users) and Twitter (200 millions users), which had already been acting as the largest centralized global forums on the Internet. These are the two most mainstream channels of communication that have been born on the web — over the last decade they have transformed the understanding and mechanisms of social interaction radically. Their technical capacity to host, debate and share information on a massive scale has united the global population to an unprecedented point.

This is because they are ‘transparent’ communication channels and their structure allows every citizen to become a potential journalist, a practice which has been increasingly common during the new wave of protests. The free flow of information, generated independently from political and corporate interest, has had a cleansing effect, allowing a clearer look into the dynamics of administrated media channels. In this sense, social networking tools effectively helped to facilitate the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, where state controlled media chose to manipulate information. “During the days of the Revolution, we watched Facebook and Youtube to find news of the martyrs,” a Tunisian living in Sfax told us.



The year 2011 has seen the biggest mass uprising of the history of the Internet so far. The global popularity of the movement has been translated into the appropriation of these public arenas, transforming them into crowd-sourced media outlets — the use of Twitter has certainly been revolutionary — and focal points of public debate on the issues explained above. The amount of blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and groups, as well as free platforms and tools successfully created to challenge the mechanisms of manipulation and control of information, is unprecedented. Every unknown user who silently but strenuously played a role in taking the Net was part of the decentralized response to the uprising.

A New Starting Point: October 15, 2011

The 15th of October of 2011 was the first global culmination of these complex processes. In almost a thousand cities, in around 90 countries, millions of people began occupying their squares, parks and public areas. In countries where the movement was already established, the growth was spectacular. Madrid and Barcelona hosted the largest protests, with almost a million people between the both of them. The fact that they were the largest protests yet serves to prove that the process, already spread out into neighborhoods, is working.

It also means that there is a healthy flow of information on the web, which in turn also influences the mass media. In previous weeks, many important cities in the US had already followed the example set by Occupy Wall Street: for example, camps in Washington D.C., Oakland, Denver and Chicago grew, and many others were started. On the 15th, it spread around the world, as hundreds of new occupations sprung up in cities such as London, Melbourne, Sao Paolo, Berlin, Seoul and many others.



In all of these cities, assemblies were organized, as well as working groups and specific task forces, replicating and reassuring the flourishing of the new system. These camps are now facing the first weeks of occupation, which are incredibly chaotic due to the organic and unguided nature of the process. Soon enough, however, we believe that the same dynamics of replication and intercommunication will set similar structures in place everywhere. This new richness, in the form of plurality, will be visible in the global structure of activism that is forming a new culture of resistance, which is of critical importance for the future of society.

Therefore it must not be forgotten that this movement is a reaction to the overwhelming understanding that the future of civilization is under serious question: the economic system is collapsing on top of the social stratus that sustains it, crushing millions underneath it, and the uncontrolled misuse of resources is seriously destroying the very planet we live on. This structure is the only way we can articulate a deep process of transformation that might save society from the gloomiest predictions. In this sense, the 15th of October marks a new beginning in the articulation within global civil society: it is the date when it became fully aware of itself and its power. Whether or not a sufficient amount of energy can be channeled towards political reform, and especially towards a general shift of underlying morale, is yet to be seen.

Source : http://roarmag.org

2011 Frontiers of Engineering: The Shape of Things to Come: Frontiers of Additive Manufacturing

National Academy of Engineering
2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
September 19-21, 2011
Google, Inc.
Mountain View, California


The Shape of Things to Come: Frontiers of Additive Manufacturing
September 19, 2011 
Presented by Dr. Hod Lipson.


ABSTRACT: Google hosted 100 attendees of the 2011 Nat'l Academy of Engineering's U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium (FOE) at our Mountain View office and Dinah's Garden Hotel in Palo Alto. The symposium is an annual three-day meeting that brings together 100 of the nation's outstanding young engineers (ages 30-45) from industry, academia, and government to discuss pioneering technical and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors.


About the speaker: Dr. Hod Lipson is an Associate Professor of the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in New York.


New Technologies like additive manufacturing (3D printing) will change everything, from the way we produce things to the way we interact with them...

The Power Of Social Media

Finally People Power

I was very interested to read the article written by the CEO ofChange Dot Comin CNN Mr. Ben Rattray recently. As most people have read in the news recently Bank of America was planning on passing on a five dollar charge on debit card use to their customers. The greed after being given a huge bailout by the government is to me beyond comprehension. The taxpayers have been hit enough by these banks especially since their own mistakes caused their financial problems in the first place. Giving mortgages and credit cards to people who did not have the income and/or the proper identification got them into this mess in the first place. Passing the cost on to consumers is the not answer. Taking responsibility for their own mistakes is.

Someone Takes a Stand

According to the article a young woman by the name of Molly Katchpole who is presently working two jobs to make ends meet was outraged by this coming charge, she is a customer of the bank. Through the social media network Face book, and others she launched a petition against this five dollar charge and it spread like wild fire, she received over three hundred thousand signatures on her petition. Change Dot Com got involved and the petition was presented to Bank of America and eventually the bank because of public pressure decided not to access the charge. Meanwhile other banks Wells Fargo, Citi Bank and JP Morgan who also considered adding the charge decided not to as well.

The Power of The People Through Social Media

Middle America is rising through protests and the Internet through social media power letting our government and corporate America that we have had enough. The people we vote into Congress have done nothing but argue and act like children getting nothing done for us. Nothing is going to be kept behind closed doors anymore once it's found out by one of two people it's on Tweeter, Face book and other means on to the Internet where the people can finally voice their views and raise their voices about what is going on in their country. It's our taxes that pay for the majority of these funding decisions and we should have a say in where our hard earned cash is going to.

Is Social Media a Good thing?

If social media is used is for information, keeping the public informed yes. To bully or harass people of course not, that is not what the intention of the social media was intended to do. Power of the people can be strong, very strong as we have seen in the last few months. The facts are we are not going back, businesses are using the Internet for research on consumer consumption, logistics, and trends. College students depend on it and law enforcement use it to map crime waves in different districts in their communities. Marketing affiliates are using it to promote products and e books. For people who cannot run around to libraries and post offices, stores and other places they need a car to get to it's a God send. As for social media itself, it can help someone gain friends around the world and learn how other people from other cultures feel about their world. We are entering a time of enlightenment, it should prove to be an interesting time for us all.

Article Source: http://www.streetarticles.com/pure-opinion/the-power-of-social-media

Macrowikinomics: Rethinking Civilization for an Age of Networked Intelligence

with Don Tapscott

Citizen Scientist 2.0

Andrea Kuszewski
The Rogue Neuron

Posted: Oct 20, 2011

What does the future of science look like?
Andrea Kuszewski
About a year ago, I was asked this question. My response then was: Transdisciplinary collaboration. Researchers from a variety of domains—biology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, law—all coming together, using inputs from each specialized area to generate the best comprehensive solutions to society’s more persistent problems. Indeed, it appears as if I was on the right track, as more and more academic research departments, as well as industries, are seeing the value in this type of partnership.
Now let’s take this a step further. Not only do I think we will be relying on inputs from researchers and experts from multiple domains to solve scientific problems, but I see society itself getting involved on a much more significant level as well. And I don’t just mean science awareness. I’m talking about actually participating in the research itself. Essentially, I see a huge boom in the future for Citizen Science.

What are Citizen Scientists?

Citizen Scientists are non-scientists who contribute data and/or analysis to aid in scientific studies, or hobbyists, often referred to as “DIYers”, conducting their own scientific studies outside of a formal research institute or university. This is usually done in their own homes, or in publicly set up “DIY Labs” such as BioCurious, a Bay Area BioTech hackspace.
With the Open Science Summit coming up in less than a week (I know! It’s almost here!), I thought this would be the perfect time to illustrate just how big of a deal Citizen Science is to the future of scientific progress.

The Key Role of Technology

‘Citizen Science’ has been around since the days of Darwin and Einstein, but today, modern technology has allowed for worldwide participation in projects and rapid analysis of data, making it a more streamlined, widely collaborative initiative. Citizen Science has seen a rise in popularity especially in the last several years, gaining traction in more diverse audiences, and utilizing the newest technological tools for outreach and data analysis.
The organization ScienceForCitizens.net, for example,  has a website where you can find out what types of projects are going on that you can get involved in, as well as upload your own citizen science project that you are seeking participation for. Participants upload their own data contribution, then they can go back to see the recorded results of everyone involved—no waiting a year or more for peer reviewed journals to release data. Science in action, right there. Practically instant gratification! 
Smart phone apps like Project Noah—which allows people to discover and document local wildlife data, then contribute those findings to on-going research being done by scientists—are setting the standard for practical, fun, and easy-to-adopt Citizen Science apps that can radically increase the amount of public interest and participation in science. This is truly a time when every person, no matter their educational background or training, can experience the wonder and beauty of the scientific method.
Even the government is starting to catch on. In fact, NASA just announced that they are releasing oodles of data for the public to access and analyze at will:

We’re excited today to announce the launch of our Data API for data.nasa.gov, the collaborative online database of NASA datasets we launched in August. The data.nasa.gov API allows a machine-readable interface to return metadata from the site organized by category, tag, date, or search term. We’re hoping this allows new and creative visualizations of the data resources NASA provides to the public. Additionally, it is a learning experience for us as we work to expand transparency, participation, and collaboration at NASA through new uses of technology.

How cool is that?! Wicked cool. If gamers can find a potential treatment for AIDS by folding proteins, I can’t wait to see what the public can do with NASA’s data.

New Kinds of Outreach

I already mentioned the Internet and smart phone apps as ways of utilizing modern technology to allow citizens to participate in science projects, but what about filming a ‘movie’ trailer to advertise your project? Check this out—a scientist is trying to get participation for a study, so he filmed a trailer to upload to YouTube, in order to recruit participants. Brilliant. Could you see doing something like this for grant proposals?



Some have predicted that learning via web video—from e-learning phenomenons like Khan Academy and the hugely popular free online courses Stanford just launched in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Databases—is poised to be the new medium of choice for the future of education.
I have to agree.
With web video, you have access to the entire world, with one 2 minute video clip. Demonstration, conveying body language, and showing facial expressions all adds to the experience, bringing us one step closer to reality, but from anywhere on the globe. Even real-time collaboration is now possible over video chat with applications like Google+ Hangouts (which integrates Google docs right into the hangout feature and allows screen-sharing and real-time modification) and the much-anticipated Hangout Academy, which is geared as a professional (or personal) building and sharing tool for limitless collaboration.
Think of the power in outreach and communication we have now, that was non-existent in Darwin’s time. I wonder how much quicker his theory of evolution would have come to fruition had the power of crowdsourcing ideas and social media tools been available to him? Blows my mind.

A New Model of ‘Scientist’

There’s another reason why I think we are going to see a rise in Citizen Science: our entire model of education and what it means to be a ‘trained professional’ is shifting. There’s a hell of a lot of resistance from the status quo—which makes it difficult and inconvenient for rapid progress—but it isn’t enough to stop it from happening. Even if society is kicking and screaming, we are still headed in that direction, like it or not.
When the university system and the current PhD paradigm was invented, it was a different time. For the majority of the world, going to a university to study under a mentor was pretty much one of the only ways to gain access to those volumes of published research, equipment, or like-minded individuals from whom you could learn. If you wanted to study advanced topics, or apprentice under someone famous to learn from their expertise, you needed to go to a university.
But things are different now.
Technology allows us access to some of the leading minds of our age, with a few clicks of the mouse. You could be living in Uganda and still participate in a Stanford University course, right alongside students in Mexico and Hawaii. Study and discussion groups form on social networks like facebook and Google+, making proximity to a university campus nearly irrelevant in order to meet other students and benefit from valuable peer-to-peer discussions. With the world’s information available on the web, and with all of these advances in technology allowing for rapid data sharing and collaboration, how much value is there in the Ivory Tower?
We are becoming a society of autodidacts, with information at our fingertips 24/7. Citizen Science is a natural consequence of that. Have an interesting scientific inquiry? Get on the web and investigate it. Learn from the millions of sources out there. Crowdsource some ideas, generate some hypotheses. Have discussions with others. Make a plan. Get your equipment. The scientific method is in-progress.
Science is free for all to explore. Why waste time jumping through bureaucratic hoops when you can begin investigating what you want, when you want? Need to fund your research? Crowdsourced methods of funding, such as Kickstarter, are becoming more popular for these types of endeavors. Instead of 100 scientists chasing the same grant, why not go to the public and let them fund what they think is valuable? I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the future. 
As technology advances and more tools are made available, science will inevitably become more open. Society just won’t stand for paywalls and red tape when there are 1000 ways to get around it, while still making scientific progress. If we want rapid progress, rapid advancement and rapid innovation, we need to allow and promote openness. The future is already here—might as well get on board and enjoy the ride!

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Andrea Kuszewski, an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET, is a researcher investigating the neuro-cognitive factors behind human behavior.

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The Zeitgeist Movement | Los Angeles CA "TownHall" | Oct 26 2011

We can imagine a new world, a better relationship with our planet and a better society based on solidarity, love and evolution of our entire ecosystem...Technology and science are helping us change everything !

Intro Part 1
 

 Jason Lord | "Visualizing a Systems Approach" |     Part 2
Google + NASA + Wolfram Alpha = ? ? ?


 Peter Joseph | "From Consequences to Solutions"|   Part 3

Post-Scarcity Anarchism

Post-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written by Murray Bookchin and first published in 1971 by Ramparts Press.^[1] It outlines the possible form anarchism might take under conditions of post-scarcity. It is one of Bookchin's major works,^[2] and its radical thesis provoked controversy for being utopian and messianic in its faith in the liberatory potential of technology.

Synopsis

Bookchin's titular "post scarcity anarchism" is an economic system based on social ecology, libertarian municipalism, and an abundance of fundamental resources. Bookchin argues that post-industrial societies are also post-scarcity societies, and can thus imagine "the fulfillment of the social and cultural potentialities latent in a technology of abundance".^[3] The self-administration of society is now made possible by technological advancement and, when technology is used in an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary potential of society will be much changed.^[4]
Bookchin claims that the expanded production made possible by the technological advances of the twentieth century were in the pursuit of market profit and at the expense of the needs of humans and of ecological sustainability. The accumulation of capital can no longer be considered a prerequisite for liberation, and the notion that obstructions such as the state, social hierarchy and vanguard political parties are necessary in the struggle for freedom of the working classes can be dispelled as a myth.

Exegesis

Bookchin's thesis is a more radical form of anarchism than that of Noam Chomsky; while both concur that information technology, being controlled by the bourgeoisie, is not necessarily liberatory, Bookchin does not refrain from countering this control by developing new, innovative and radical technologies of the self.^[3] Postanarchist scholar Lewis Call compares Bookchin's language to that of Marcel Mauss, George Bataille and Herbert Marcuse, and notes that Bookchin anticipates the importance of cybernetic technology to the development of human potential over a decade before the origin of cyberpunk.^[3] The collection has been cited favourably by Marius de Geus as presenting "inspiring sketches" of the future,^[5] and as "an insightful analysis" and "a discussion of revolutionary potential in a technological society" by Peggy Kornegger in her essay "Anarchism: The Feminist Collection".

References

1. ^ "Post-scarcity anarchism, [WorldCat.org]". WorldCat.org. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
2. ^ Smith, Mark (1999). Thinking through the Environment. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415211727.
3. ^ ^{a b c d} Call, Lewis (2002). Postmodern Anarchism. Lexington: Lexington Books. ISBN 0739105221.
4. ^ ^{a b} "Post-Scarcity Anarchism". AK Press. Retrieved 2008-06-10.
5. ^ Geus, Marius (1998). Ecological Utopias. Utrecht: International Books. ISBN 9057270196.
6. ^ Kornegger, Peggy (2003). "Anarchism: The Feminist Collection". In Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Quiet Rumours. Stirling: AK Press. ISBN 1902593405.

 Source : Wikipedia

Post scarcity

From Wikipedia

  

The scarcity problem

Main article: Scarcity

Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants, in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be pursued at the same time; trade-offs are made of one good against others. As such, the term post-scarcity economics may be somewhat paradoxical. To quote a 1932 essay by Lionel Robbins, economics is "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."^[1]
Although some argue that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth,^[2][3][4][5] this would generally not be termed a "post-scarcity society" unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone.^{[citation needed]} (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel, a software engineer working on open-source software, or an editor creating or modifying some types of wiki pages and other user-generated content.)^{[citation needed]}
There are some exceptions to this use of the term. For example, Anthony Giddens, uses "post-scarcity" to refer to a set of trends he sees in modern industrialized nations, such as an increased focus on "life politics" and a decreased focus on productivity and economic growth.^{[citation needed]} Giddens acknowledges that the term has also been used historically to mean a literal end of scarcity.
Most Marxists envision later phases of a worldwide communist society as a form of post-scarcity society.^{[citation needed]}

 

 

Means

 

Speculative technology

Most visions of post-scarcity societies assume the existence of new technologies which make it much easier for society to produce nearly all goods in great abundance, given raw materials and energy. More speculative forms of nanotechnology (such as molecular assemblers or nanofactories) raise the possibility of devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy.^[6] Even before that level of technology can be achieved, fab labs and advanced industrial automation might be able to produce most physical goods that people desire, with a minimal amount of human labor required.^[6]
As for the raw materials and energy needed as input for such automated production systems, self-replicating automated mining plants set loose in the asteroid belt (see asteroid mining) or other areas of space with huge amounts of untapped raw materials could cause the prices of these materials to plummet. New power sources such as fusion power or solar power satellites could do the same for energy, especially if the power plants/power satellites could themselves be constructed in a highly automated way, so their number would be limited only by raw materials and energy.^[6]

Digital abundance

Traditionally, creators have used (and continue to use) raw materials to instantiate their works: a painter might use oil and canvas, a sculptor might work in clay, an architect might draft designs in pen and ink. Such work would result in a single copy (or "artifact"). While mass reproduction of such works ("impressions") — by processes such as printmaking or photocopying — is possible and common, such reproduction still incurs appreciable costs (for example for the paper used, and for the physical distribution of the copy).
Where the artifact can be captured digitally, copies have minimal reproduction costs. The same painter could create an original work with graphics software; the sculptor might use rapid prototyping, direct digital manufacturing, and 3D printing; the architect CAD/CAM tools. Most of the "cost" in such works is in paying for the original design and development (but most of it goes too to distribution, administration and production, thereby the artist being paid only a minimal amount of what the enterprise really produces) — for the creators' expertise and for their tools (though these also do not wear out the same way physical tools do). While the creators of such works must still labor to create the design matrix, there are virtually no raw-materials required to recreate the work once completed.
This negligible-cost reproduction raises the question, "How much should one pay for something that can be copied near-indefinitely at minimal expense?" Does a purchaser have the right to reproduce their own copy as much as they can afford to? Some people believe the purchaser does not or should not have any rights to copy or transfer ownership, and use Digital Rights Management to try to enforce this view^{[citation needed]}. Others instead feel that information should be freely distributed (see copyleft), and that DRM measures are attempts to restore prior business models' viability by inducing artificial scarcity.^{[citation needed]}
Many advocates of open source software and Free software attempt to collaboratively create open-source software programs which are intended to offer similar capabilities to their proprietary software competitors, but with the source code made public and permission granted for users to freely copy the software. Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project which designed the Free software GNU operating system, and co-founder of the free software movement, has explicitly cited the eventual creation of a post-scarcity society as one of his motivations:^[7]

In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.

Effects

Economic paradigm

Market economies or planned economies may be unnecessary in a post-scarcity age, though gift or exchange economies may take their place once the scarcity driving earlier types of economy disappears.^[8][9] Post-scarcity societies might also have their market economies limited to the exchange of energy and resources, or of other scarce or even non-material things, such as status or reputation (see Whuffie for a fictional example), real estate, or skills and expertise.
Many science-fiction variants also imagine the very concept of ownership to weaken or disappear,^[10] as people lose attachment to all but sentimental-value items, knowing that they will always be able to receive or create replacements. Monetary systems in consequence also cease to be a factor. Many stories depict these changes as a positive advancement, freeing humanity from both toil and greed. Others posit that handing production and most other services over to machines and computers will stunt the spirit of humanity, or even lead to a loss of control over humanity's own fate, e.g., Jack Williamson's With Folded Hands.

Unavoidable scarcity

Some things will remain rare even in a post-scarcity society. There is a practical limit to the number of people who can live in any specific, 'in-demand' locale. However, hypothetical machines such as a nanofactory are envisioned as being able to produce any real-world artifact, and some fictions even envision the physical creation of new living space (orbitals^[10] or ringworlds^[11]) to reduce this scarcity. This would likely further reduce (though not fully abolish) the value of an 'original' item or a specific locale to live in. Engineers have suggested megascale structures such as an Alderson disk or Dyson sphere to provide abundant living space and energy.
Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unavoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Thomas Robert Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Albert Bartlett, and others, exponential growth in human population has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe^[12] Although this would imply the invention of faster than light travel, necessary for humanity to spread throughout the universe as fast as population growth, even at lower growth rates these levels would still be reached in readily imaginable times.^{[citation needed]} It is therefore difficult to conceive of a credible post scarcity scenario which does not also imply zero population growth or relatively low population growth, even though possible future technologies such as self-replicating spacecraft could theoretically maintain exponential growth far beyond earth's carrying capacity.
At present, the total fertility rate is high in poor countries with poor health infrastructure, but it tends to drop to replacement levels or lower once a nation reaches a per capita income of roughly $10,000.^[13] In fact, virtually every wealthy OECD nation currently has a total fertility rate that is below replacement levels, implying a coming population decline for the west. Due to the decline in fertility that tends to accompany wealth (of the 233 countries listed by the CIA for fertility, 100 have fertility rates below replacement rates), human population is expected to stabilize at near 9 billion by 2050.^[14]

Fiction

Utopias

Fictional post-scarcity societies include varied settings, such as The Queendom of Sol in the series of the same name by Wil McCarthy, "the Festival" and agalmic economics from Singularity Sky and Accelerando by Charles Stross, and the United Federation of Planets from the Star Trek series.
One of the earliest treatments of a transition to a post-scarcity society occurs in Pandora's Millions by George O. Smith, in which the development of a "matter duplicator" that can replicate almost any scannable object causes an economic collapse, and a return to a barter economy for the only remaining scarce resource: Skilled human labor. Chaos ensues until the inventors of the matter duplicator discover a substance that explodes when scanned by the duplicator beam. This new substance, "Identium," serves as a new medium of exchange for skilled labor, in a post-scarcity society otherwise primarily devoted to the pursuit of leisure, science, art, the occasional lawsuit, and the sale and exchange of "Certified Uniques" — objects whose chain of provenance can legally establish that they have never been scanned by a duplicator beam.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy describes the beginning development of a highly automated society whose economy was to be based on caloric input/output and had only a few materials valued based on their scarcity. However, the inherent problems of such a system (such as its remaining capitalist elements or the difficulty in fixing the worth of academic work) are not resolved within the timeframe depicted in the trilogy.
An intermediate step to a post-scarcity society is shown in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, where fabricator technology allows the growth of any item that one has design plans for - however, the poor receive a lesser amount of energy and resources per day to use, and thus have to wait longer for their items to be fabricated. Also, their items tend to be smaller, as they have no access to large-scale fabricators. This system, fueled by a centrally-distributed matter 'feed' is eventually replaced by the protean 'seed', which is able to take in raw materials from its environment to develop into whatever its program dictates. No longer bound to the aristocratically-controlled feeds, the society moves to a post-scarcity economy.
James P. Hogan has written several works where post-scarcity plays a major role. Voyage from Yesteryear details the society of the "Chironians", embryo colonists of Alpha Centauri who have adopted such a lifestyle. Cradle of Saturn and its sequel The Anguished Dawn is mostly told from the perspective of the "Kronians", a pseudo-religion who colonize Saturn's largest satellite in the process of developing such a society. Both stories are driven by the difficulties of changing an existing economic paradigm, and postulate that a fresh start may be necessary to overcome old thinking about money and possessions.
Rudy Rucker also dealt with this jarring transition in Realware in which humans receive an alien device that can instantiate any consumer product they have seen. This leads to a breakdown of the market, with stores blacking out their windows in a vain attempt to prevent people from 'copying' their products. Still, people who do buy the products find them instantly copied once out on the streets.
Iain M. Banks' The Culture stories center around an advanced spacefaring civilization that has used artificial intelligences to provide extremely abundant (and in daily practice unlimited) amounts of goods and services using advanced technology, describing a fully post scarcity society, which also attempts to influence other galactic societies towards the advanced cultural stage that freedom from greed and material need has allowed it. As Banks puts it in a 1994 article, "nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."
John C. Wright's novel The Golden Age deals with a future voluntary libertarian society spanning the solar system called the Golden Oecumene. Due to technology, nearly everyone is immortal and tremendously wealthy except those living outside society due to exile or by choice. The Sophotechs, a superior line of computer intelligences, do most of the work, research, and simulations required by the society. Throughout the book the main character, Phaethon, has to face off against a technologically superior and unknown enemy while also dealing with a post-scarcity society which is afraid of death and instability more than anything else and does not believe his plight.
In the short novel Manna^[15], Marshall Brain writes of a dystopian society ruined by advanced robotics as well as a utopian society enabled by it. The protagonist escapes life in a government run dormitory because his father bought shares in the fictional "Australia Project".

Dystopias

There have also been fully dystopian science fiction societies where all people's physical needs are provided for by machines, but this causes humans to become overly docile, uncreative and incurious. Examples include E. M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops", Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel The City and the Stars. "Riders of the Purple Wage", Philip José Farmer's dystopian 1967 science fiction novella also explores some ramifications of a future wherein technology allows everyone's desires to be met. David Weber's Honor Harrington saga has the example of the People's Republic of Haven, in which each citizen is due a Basic Living Stipend. With most of their population "on the dole", productivity and their economy collapse. In Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague," resources and luxuries are so common, that the poor must bear the burden of consuming and disposing of the bounty, as well as working at meaningless jobs to produce more meaningless plenty; the rich, conversely, are allowed to live simple but comfortable lifestyles. In Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, a central motif is unbounded progress of technology. In The Highest Possible Level of Development civilization, the inhabitants have become passive, and the visitors have to shoo away machines trying to comfort them. In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the Time Traveller speculates, based on the Eloi, that mankind had been "armed with a perfected science" which reduced all dangers in nature, epitomized by the quote: "Strength is the outcome of need". The 2008 Pixar film WALL-E also depicts what appears to be a post-scarcity dystopia, albeit humorously imagined.

See also

Capacity development Gift economy James S. Albus (section Peoples' Capitalism) Julian Lincoln Simon Post-capitalism Post-Scarcity Anarchism Pure communism Strong AI

Socialist economics Techno-progressivism Techno-utopia Technocracy movement Technological singularity The Ultimate Resource The Venus Project Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt

References

1. ^ Robbins, Lionel (1945). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. http://www.mises.org/books/robbinsessay2.pdf. , p. 16
2. ^ Press Release United Nations Environment Programme - Cutting Food Losses from Farm to Kitchen and Converting Wastes into Animal Feeds a Key Opportunity. Published 17 February 2009, retrieved 26 Dec 2010. http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=562&ArticleID=6084&l=en
3. ^ The £20bn food mountain: Britons throw away half of the food produced each year. Published 2 March 2008, retrieved 26 Dec 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/news/the-16320bn-food-mountain-britons-throw-away-half-of-the-food-produced-each-year-790318.html
4. ^ One Country’s Table Scraps, Another Country’s Meal. Published 18 May 2008, retrieved 26 Dec 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/weekinreview/18martin.html
5. ^ Office of Knowledge Exchange, Research and Extension (Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN) http://www.fao.org/oek/oek-home/en/
6. ^ ^{a b c} Engines of Creation (full text online, see also Engines of Creation) - Drexler, Eric K., Anchor Books, 1986
7. ^ GNU Manifesto (full text online, see also GNU Manifesto) - Stallman, Richard; Dr. Dobb's Journal, March 1985
8. ^ "The Gift Economy" - Vaughan, Genevieve, Ms. magazine, 1990
9. ^ The Hacker Culture as Gift Economy (full text online, see also Homesteading the Noosphere) - Raymond, Eric S., April 1998
10. ^ ^{a b} Various novels set in the 'The Culture' universe - Banks, Ian M.; 1987-2000
11. ^ Various novels from the 'Ringworld' series - Niven, Larry; 1970-2004
12. ^ Muir, Patricia (2007-11-01). "Cornucopian versus New Malthusian perspectives". http://oregonstate.edu/~muirp/cornucop.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-18. 
13. ^ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TFR_vs_PPP_2009.svg
14. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.png
15. ^ [1]