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

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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Occupy Wall Street Hackathons Produce Digital Tools and New Activists

Groups of programmers gathered in three cities this weekend to build digital tools for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several of those tools have already launched, and in many cases they’re being maintained by activists who’ve never held a sign in a park.

“I was waiting to see how I should be involved,” says Jake Levitas, who attended the San Francisco hackathon. “In the last week, I thought, ‘I know I’m going to dedicate a lot of time to this movement. I don’t know how, but I know I want to be involved.’”

When he found out about the hackathon through Facebook, he knew how he wanted to participate. Levitas, working with a small team at the event, started a design library called OccupyDesign. It’s a database of Occupy Wall Street protest placards, logistical signs and icons — with a strong focus on infographics. The idea, he says, is that it is harder to argue with facts presented visually than it is a talking point, and that a centralized visual library can help the protests make a strong impression. And he hopes this project will get more designers like him involved.

“Especially if they don’t think they can sleep on the street for a while,” he says, “they don’t know how they can plug in.”

Around the same time Levitas was working on OccupyDesign in San Francisco, Mark Belinsky was working on a decentralized decision-making platform that he calls OccupyVotes on the opposite coast. Belinsky, the president of a non-profit called Digital Democracy, used his time at the New York City hackathon to turn a platform he developed for the Jan. 25 protests in Egypt into a tool for articulating the goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“It kind of struck me, of course we can use it here, because the media keeps asking what the protesters want,” he says.

OccupyVotes simply asks users to cast votes for one of two movement goals. For instance, “allow collective bargaining” or “enact mandatory limits/caps on campaign spending” are two options. Users, theoretically Occupy Wall Street activists, choose one idea or “I can’t decide” and are immediately presented with another choice. Every idea stays “above the fold” and anyone is free to add a new idea. The hope is that eventually this approach will sort out what the decentralized group as a whole finds important.

Since Belinsky sent OccupyVotes to Occupy Wall Street listservs, put up a Facebook page and started tweeting about it, the site has collected about 10,000 votes. So far “repeal corporate personhood” and “allow the Bush tax cuts to expire” are the most popular ideas and “another bailout” is the least popular. Soon Belinsky hopes to send volunteers with tablet computers into Zuccotti Park to collect votes from the protesters there.

Other hackathon attendees built a group texting app for on-the-fly coordination, a Q&A site for occupy organizers, a video-editing platform that doubles as an advertising platform, an app that can use multiple cellphones in a small area to amplify one person’s voice and offered suggestions for the Occupied Wall Street Journal‘s website. Their projects are in various stages of launch.

Matt Ewing, the organizer of the San Francisco hackathon, said he solicited ideas from Occupy listservs before the hackathon. Many of those ideas were among the six built by about 40 programmers during the event, but some came from the programmers themselves.

“I think we’ve built some powerful tools that when deployed will help grow the movement,” he says. “It’s a small part of a movement that is constantly getting bigger, but an important part.”

Source : http://mashable.com/2011/10/19/occupy-wall-street-hackathons-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Economic Impact of the Personal Nanofactory

Robert A. Freitas Jr
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, Palo Alto, California, USA


Is the advent of, and mass availability of, desktop personal nanofactories (PNs) likely to
cause deflation (a persistent decline in the general prices of goods and services), inflation (a
persistent general price increase), or neither?
A definitive analysis would have to address: (1) the technical assumptions that are made,
including as yet imprecisely defined future technological advances and the pace and order of
their introduction; (2) the feedback-mediated dynamic responses of the macroeconomy in
situations where we don’t have a lot of historical data to guide us; (3) the counter-leaning
responses of existing power centers (corporate entities, wealthy owners/investors, influential
political actors, antitechnology-driven activists, etc.) to the potential dilution of their power,
influence, or interests, including their likely efforts to actively oppose or at least delay this
potential dilution; (4) legal restrictions that may be placed on the widespread use of certain
technological options, for reasons ranging from legitimate public safety and environmental
concerns to crass political or commercial opportunism; (5) the possibility (having an as yet illdefined probability) that nanotechnology might actually “break the system” and render conventional capitalism obsolete (much as solid state electronics obsoleted vacuum tubes), in which
case it is not clear what new economic system might replace capitalism; and (6) the changes in
human economic behavior that may result when human nature itself may have changed.
A definitive answer is beyond the scope of this essay. Here, we take only a first look at
the question...

http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/NoninflationaryPN.pdf

Embracing Post-Privacy !

Optimism towards a future where there is "Nothing to hide"

The breaking away of privacy in the digital world is often understood as something dangerous, and for good reasons. But could there be opportunities in it, too? Do the current cultural and technological trends only dissolve the protected area of privacy, or could they dissolve as well the pressures that privacy is supposed to liberate us from? What if we witness a transformation of civilization so profound that terms like "private" and "public" lose their meaning altogether? Maybe we won't need "privacy" at all in the future because we will value other, new liberties more strongly?

In the digital world, more and more data is accumulated about us. More and more methods of datamining are invented to extract information from these data. The youth grows up enjoying informational exhibitionism to a degree many find irresponsible. Ever greater parts of life are integrated into the global public information stream. Will privacy end? If so, what about liberty? We have to look closely at the value of privacy. What does it do for values like freedom, individualism or intimacy? Why is this protected area of privacy necessary?

The conditions of privacy are rapidly changing. We have to evaluate these changes with a perspective that does justice to new modes of identity, sociality and culture: Why hide your personal weirdnesses if 21st century society thrives on difference and originality instead of conformism and predictability? What identity is there to keep private if "identity" is more and more what you externalize from yourself into the internet? Is privacy worth missing out on participation in the global "hive mind" and the "ambient intimacy" of every mind connected with every other mind?

Such questions may sound utopian and/or crazy. They may sound irresponsible, considering anti-privacy trends that may seem much more real and dangerous -- like the surveillance state. But even if you disagree with their validity, they may provoke deeper thinking about the state and value of privacy in a world that is changing more and more rapidly -- and that could hardly be a bad thing.

More information about the 25th Chaos Communication Congress can be found via the Chaos Communication Congress website:http://bit.ly/25c3_program

Source: http://bit.ly/25c3_videos

Speaker: Christian Heller / plomlompom