'Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users. On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway. The subtext—an overt subtext—of the popular account of Facebook is that the network has a proprietary claim and special insight into social behavior. For enterprises and advertising agencies, it is therefore the bridge to new modes of human connection. But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook. So the social network is left in the same position as all other media companies. Instead of being inevitable and unavoidable, it has to sell the one-off virtue of its audience like every other humper on Madison Avenue.' -- Waiting for Godot

'Progress comes in two flavors: horizontal/extensive and vertical/intensive. Horizontal or extensive progress basically means copying things that work. In one word, it means simply “globalization.” Consider what China will be like in 50 years. The safe bet is it will be a lot like the United States is now. Cities will be copied, cars will be copied, and rail systems will be copied. Maybe some steps will be skipped. But it’s copying all the same. -- Vertical or intensive progress, by contrast, means doing new things. The single word for this is “technology.” Intensive progress involves going from 0 to 1 (not simply the 1 to n of globalization). -- It’s worth noting that globalization and technology do have some interplay; we shouldn’t falsely dichotomize them. Consider resource constraints as a 1 to n subproblem. Maybe not everyone can have a car because that would be environmentally catastrophic. If 1 to n is so blocked, only 0 to 1 solutions can help. Technological development is thus crucially important, even if all we really care about is globalization. -- Teaching vertical progress or innovation is almost a contradiction in terms. Education is fundamentally about going from 1 to n. -- Companies exist because they optimally address internal and external coordination costs. In general, as an entity grows, so do its internal coordination costs. But its external coordination costs fall. Totalitarian government is entity writ large; external coordination is easy, since those costs are zero. But internal coordination, as Hayek and the Austrians showed, is hard and costly; central planning doesn’t work. The flipside is that internal coordination costs for independent contractors are zero, but external coordination costs (uniquely contracting with absolutely everybody one deals with) are very high, possibly paralyzingly so. Optimality—firm size—is a matter of finding the right combination. Size and internal vs. external coordination costs matter a lot. North of 100 people in a company, employees don’t all know each other. Politics become important. Incentives change. Signaling that work is being done may become more important than actually doing work. These costs are almost always underestimated. The familiar Austrian critique dovetails here as well. Even if a computer could model all the narrowly economic problems a company faces (and, to be clear, none can), it wouldn’t be enough. To model all costs, it would have to model human irrationalities, emotions, feelings, and interactions. Computers help, but we still don’t have all the info. And if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. So, in practice, we end up having companies of a certain size. Anyone on a mission tends to want to go from 0 to 1. You can only do that if you’re surrounded by others to want to go from 0 to 1. That happens in startups, not huge companies or government.'

'Currently, transactions within the shadow economy have to be made face to face, but an electronic System D currency would enable remote and even cross-border transactions. This could significantly broaden the entire informal ecosystem because consumers would have an international reach and merchants would have vast new choices in selecting suppliers. Not all bitcoin transactions require a standard computer and if the mobile payment prognosticators are correct, the mobile phone equipped with applications like Bitcoin Android could end up originating the majority of bitcoin transactions. Contrary to the thesis of anti-cashist David Wolman, the unbanked and the System D traders will not migrate away from cash unless its replacement offers similar privacy features. Bitcoin is barely three years young. Any bootstrapped currency initially will have a chicken-and-egg problem due to the fact that a currency’s overall success is determined by its network effect and pervasive spread. Critics of bitcoin as a currency are quick to point out that not many merchants accept it as a payment type yet. That will change. And, they also point out that the total available market is severely limited. Oh, how wrong! Bitcoin’s first potential mega-market just so happens to be the second largest economy in the world and its sole competitor in that sphere is depreciating government paper cash. Game on.'

'Rather ironically, most of the mechanisms required to observe and control subcultures are being invented by subcultures themselves. External forces are merely stepping in to co-opt them. The subcultural web is now being made legible and governable under the harsh light of Facebook Like actions. Just in time too, since the returns on coarser forms of political and economic exploitation are now rapidly diminishing. Contrary to popular belief, subcultures are not vague constructs. They have a precise, if negative, definition: a subculture is a pattern of social order that is not worth codifying and institutionalizing for the purposes of governance or economic exploitation, under normal circumstances. The Internet though, has changed all this. It has allowed subcultures to scale (by moving their secret-handshake institutions online), and become more valuable in the process. While mass-manufactured celebrity cultures have been weakening, we are not returning to pre-mass-media patterns of local culture. Instead, we’ve evolved to mega-subcultures that scale without developing institutions. And at the same time, the visibility of subcultural behaviors has made governance and exploitation much cheaper and easier. ...once marketers working with Big Data get ahead of the cultural curve, you can expect the balance of power to shift decisively in their favor. From detecting subcultures before future members themselves do, to actively seeding, breeding and shaping desirable subcultures, is not a big leap to imagine. It will be a world of pre-cognitive marketing, run by quants in data vats.'

'Now that everyone has a media platform, look for even more of the mutual back scratching that comes from tracking favors. Humans have a natural openness to reciprocity. It's a time-honored survival technique, one that allowed us to live together in villages for millenia. Someone who doesn't reciprocate is less likely to be protected by his peers, right? Not only have we been taught reciprocation since birth, but it feels right. It's baked in. The problem occurs when the trading of favors become mercenary, when alert individuals start manipulating the system for personal gain. Suddenly, every favor is suspect, measured and not at all generous. Suddenly all the likes and links and blurbs become nothing but currency, not the honest appraisals of people we can trust. It means that bystanders have trouble telling the difference between honest approval and the mere mutual shilling of traded favors.'

'More and more people are starting to sense that they don’t need a different government; rather, they don’t need a government at all. They see that the institution is just a scam for the benefit of some people: those who are in it, their friends, and those who act as parasites by using the state to live off others. I think we’re on the cusp of seeing new forms of social organization arise. That’s what Stephenson postulated, and I think he’s right. In the not-too-distant future, we’ll see more and more people grouping themselves in phyles. They’ll stop identifying themselves as Americans, or Russians, or Chinese – unless that accident of birth is really important to them. Racism and nationalism are the hallmarks of an unevolved, or even degraded, person. I have neither time nor patience for either of them. I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: I have less affinity with my neighbors in Aspen than I do with friends in the Congo – even though we’re of a different race, religion, culture, and mother language. Why is that? Because those things are unimportant to me. What’s important to me is character, and the values one holds dear. So, sure, I think the advent of phyles is a very good thing. There would be phyles of all types, including those that value strict control, regimentation, and limitations. Groups like monks and nuns are proto-phyles, as are the Mennonites. A phyle can form around anything that’s most important to any group of people– and that could include everything from business, to hobbies, to religion, to culture, to philosophy. There are endless possibilities.' -- Be like the internet

'The pre-Interent double-take zone was fairly stable. Double-take events were truly serendipitous and generally didn’t go anywhere. Most relationship options expired due to low social and geographic mobility. A random encounter was just a random encounter. Since double-take encounters temporarily dislocate people from the default context through which you know them, and make them temporarily more alive after, you could say the double-take zone is coming alive with nascent relationships: relationships that have been dislodged from a fixed physical or digital context, but haven’t yet been socially situated. There is an additional necessary condition for more to happen: the double-take moment must also destabilize default assumptions about relative status. ...one of the effects of the breakdown of the middle class and trading-up is that status relationships become context-dependent. There is no default context. You never know when you might turn a barista into a new friend after a double-take encounter, or renew a relationship with an old one via a Facebook Like. The sane default attitude today is the world is small and life is long. Reinventing yourself is becoming prohibitively expensive.'

'When you look at old writing technology, poetry suddenly makes sense. It is modular content that comes in fixed-length chunks, with redundancy and error-correcting codes built in. It is designed to be transmitted and copied across time and space through unreliable and noisy channels, one stone tablet, palm leaf or piece of handmade paper at a time. The technology was still unreliable enough that the oral tradition remained the primary channel. Writing began as a medium for backups. Scribes were the first data warehousing experts. They did more than merely transcribe the spoken word. They compressed, corrected and encrypted as well, and periodically updated texts to reflect the extant state of the oral tradition. That is why verses are so eminently quotable outside the context of poems. Poems are extensive oral containers of arbitrary length, in some cases delineated after the fact. Verses are standardized containers designed to carry intense, dense, archival-quality words around. Today we view traditional verse epics as single works. -- The prose book can stand apart from broader social processes in radically individual ways. It can travel from writer to readers largely unaltered, setting up a hub-spoke pattern of conversational circuits. The Web obscures the crucial and necessary distinction between oral and written cultures. Some bloggers perform and talk. Others are scribes.'

'Trust is built when no one is looking, when you think you have the option of cutting corners and when you find a loophole. Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool. The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers. The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.'

'Let’s explore what could be ahead for public libraries and how we could collectively transform them into “factories” — not factories that make things, but factories that help make people who want to learn and make things. Will libraries go away? Will they become hackerspaces, TechShops, tool-lending libraries, and Fab Labs, or have these new, almost-public spaces displaced a new role for libraries? For many of us, books themselves are tools. In the sense that books are tools of knowledge, the library is a repository for tools, so will we add “real tools” for the 21st century?'

'I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. Or an actor. I read them as part of a Nashville Shakespeare Festival program called “Shakespeare Allowed!” which invites a group of strangers to gather at a giant square table in the downtown library and read one speech or line at a time, round-robin-style, regardless of gender or acting ability. ...as we worked through the canon, I found myself discovering that the whole point of the project — to simply read the plays aloud — got me halfway to understanding the text. It was amazing how that text seeped into me without my even knowing it. While reading “King Lear,” Lear’s final death speech (“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never!”) fell to me, and I had no idea I was even understanding it until I got to those five “nevers. ” Shakespeare didn’t give me just one to say, he gave me five. Five. Five grieving nevers, spoken by a heartbroken, dying king. To my surprise, I was in such a state of tears I almost had to pass the rest of the speech to the person next to me. After that, I was known as “the guy who cried.”'

'You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe. It used to be that System D was small -- a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. By 2020, the OECD projects, two-thirds of the workers of the world will be employed in System D. There's no multinational, no Daddy Warbucks or Bill Gates, no government that can rival that level of job creation. Given its size, it makes no sense to talk of development, growth, sustainability, or globalization without reckoning with System D. The total value of System D as a global phenomenon is close to $10 trillion. Which makes for another astonishing revelation. If System D were an independent nation, united in a single political structure -- call it the United Street Sellers Republic (USSR) or, perhaps, Bazaaristan -- it would be an economic superpower, the second-largest economy in the world (the United States, with a GDP of $14 trillion, is numero uno). In other words, System D looks a lot like the future of the global economy.'

'As of 2011, there are 1.4 m people in US gangs. That's 40% higher than 2009 (FBI: 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment). Why the rapid growth? Lots of little factors, but the big driver: 17% unemployment (with treble that in areas where gangs are prevalent) and the growing illegitimacy of the current power structures. With the ongoing deterioration of the US system, young people are going to increasingly opt to give their primary loyalty to organizations that will take care of them. More interestingly than simple gang growth/spread, is the increasing presence of gang members in the military (primarily the Army) and the transfer of combat skills gained in Iraq/Afghanistan to the street. The US, currently running a $1.5 trillion a year deficit with the spectre of HUGE cuts in the military (reduction in force) as a certainty, will dump hundreds of thousands of combat vets onto the street w/o an economy able to absorb them.'

'Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.'

'After discovering that BBM and their Twittery playthings fed straight into the hands of the cops, smartphone-toting revolutionaries have taken up a new type of instant messaging – Vibe. Like Twitter in that it is open and lets you mass-message, Vibe is unlike Twitter in that all messages or "vibes" are anonymous. You can set how far you want them to be available too – from 15 metres to global. The messages self-destruct after a set period of time: from 15 minutes to forever.' -- Autistic mode.

'We are coming to the big face-off between top-down control by those who would be gods over us and impose value on us, and bottom up creativity which recognizes that any “god” (energy, good, intelligence) comes up through us and is connected between us. It is this “within” and “between” well-negotiated and exchanged that produces real value. We need to transfer that growth and “frontier” mentality to non-scarce, non-material assets like learning, intellect, culture, music, community, family, creativity, human connection and interest. This is now happening. This movement will be driven by the younger, Generation X and millennial generations. Baby boomers may follow, but probably only after initially resisting, and trying to make the system work long enough so they can cash in their corporate 401(k)s and extract their welfare state entitlements. ...but eventually they will have to capitulate, find a renewed purpose, dust off their 60’s idealism, and reapply themselves.'

'Rule #1: Go where the food is! Regardless of the state you live in, get out of the city and into a rural area. Next, a community’s proximity to urban environments must be considered. Many rural retreats are still vulnerable to being flooded by unprepared city dwellers in search of food at the onset of collapse. ... [live] at least one tank of gas distance from major metropolitan areas. Just as there are better places to live in each state, there are also better states to live in; what we call “Safe Havens.” Safe Havens are meant to consist of a large number of people, with a diverse membership, living in relative proximity. Safe Havens are NOT compounds, communes, or any other such nonsense that requires too many people in too small an area with too many rules. A Safe Haven will not be dictated or micromanaged through pyramid structures, military hierarchy, or “community tribunals”. It is a designated area of free cooperation, not a creepy village of collectivists...'

Broadcast Channel 4 1/1/1998 -- 'Docu-drama of what the media might be like by the year 2012. EQUINOX's first drama, set in the future, focuses on the facts behind the suspicious death of media mogul, Liam Keller, whose software applications have had a huge impact upon broadcast TV, earning him enemies around the world. In the late 1990s, Keller had devised 'Gambit', a virus which enabled all technologies (the internet, television broadcasting, e-mail) to converge – to communicate with one another. Found floating in the Thames, a television current affairs programme sets out to explore how Keller might have met his death. Through Keller's life story this drama explores the consequences of future technology, reflecting on what might happen to our present day media over the next few years.' -- Keller: "The government is committing large scale larceny... [forcing] you to pay taxes for services that they aren't providing. From a consumer point-of-view, government is a failing brand."

'In January 1776 Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense”, which rallied the colonists against the British crown, was printed in a run of 1,000 copies. One of them reached George Washington, who was so impressed that he made American officers read extracts of Paine’s work to their men. By July 1776 around 250,000 people, nearly half the free population of the colonies, had been exposed to Paine’s ideas. Newspapers at the time had small, local circulations and were a mix of opinionated editorials, contributions from readers and items from other papers; there were no dedicated reporters. All these early media conveyed news, gossip, opinion and ideas within particular social circles or communities, with little distinction between producers and consumers of information. They were social media. In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. The mass-media era now looks like a relatively brief and anomalous period that is coming to an end.'

'The oral world is ephemeral, exists only suspended in time, supported primarily through interpersonal connections, survives only on memory, and rather than building final, cumulative works, it is aimed at conversation and remembering knowledge by rendering it memorable, which can often mean snarky, witty, rhythmic and rhyming. (Think poet slams rather than essays). In oral psychodynamics, the conversational, formulaic styling dominates (which aides memory) as well as back-and-forth, redundancy, an emphasis on being less analytic and more aggregative, being more additive rather than developing complex and subordinate clauses (classic example is the Genesis which, like Homer’s Odyssey, is indeed an oral work which was later written down). Oral pschodynamics also tend to be more antogonistic, interpersonal and participatory.'

'Bitcoin is a theoretical and practical breakthrough that makes it possible to decentralize services we couldn't previously decentralize. ...it's a means to make consensus in highly distributed large-scale systems, which would otherwise never be able to reach consensus. The most obvious value of Bitcoin is as a medium of exchange for goods and services that can't be easily bought or sold using cash issued by a central authority. But there's more. Bitcoin also makes it possible to fully decentralize the DNS (Domain Name System). DNS is getting censored by governments because they can. And every time you store value in currency, you're trusting a central authority that it isn't mismanaged and thus depreciates in value. Is there value in Bitcoin? Let me ask a counter question: Is decentralization valuable? If you think that we'll increasingly lose trust in the central authorities that manage the infrastructure we rely on, you might expect Bitcoins to rise a lot in value.'

'Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" was set some years after encrypted currencies removed most economic transactions into darknets beyond the government's capability of monitoring and regulating, and thus caused tax bases around the world to implode. This was followed, in short order, by the collapse of most nation-states. In the ensuing Interregnum, the defunct nation-states were replaced by city-states and by networked global civil societies called "phyles." The major phyles leased enclaves in most major city-states around the world, much as the Venetian merchant guilds leased "Venetian quarters" in the major port cities of the Mediterranean. Membership in the phyles was voluntary, and the provision of the kinds of public services and social safety nets formerly associated with states was generally tied to voluntary membership subscriptions of some sort. -- If Bitcoin isn't the Messiah of the darknet economy, at the very least it's John the Baptist preaching its immanent arrival.'

'...much of what passes for a career nowadays is unfortunately wrapped round a bevy of elite memes. Just because the elites can print enough money to create whole new industries that last only a few years, doesn't mean that one can build a career around them. ...much may change over the next years, including the idea of what constitutes a career – and even what constitutes modern civilization. What good is literacy when it spawns a militaristic society that uses this ability to spread Anglo-American authoritarianism around the world; what good is an education if you are in some sense contributing to your own enslavement? Perhaps the best thing to do at this point would be to apprentice oneself to a trade and then chart the course of the autodidact on one's own. With the Internet does one really need to spend four-years in a university spending tens of thousands of dollars for careers that may vanish with the next financial collapse?'

'...energy and ideas could be used to shrink autonomously-owned individual time and grow a space of corporate-owned time, to be divided between production and consumption. Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain. Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle, but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel. Each new pocket of attention is harder to find...'

'Sinnreich envisions a new internet that uses mesh networking to produce a stable, ad hoc, global wireless network in which each user is a router, server and client combined, and in which no single state or organization can effectively censor or surveil the population on a broad scale.'

'The Internet has been remarkably efficient at circulating information that counteracts and destabilizes [power elite memes]. And without the ability to promote such propaganda, the elites are left with authoritarian tools that substitute force for persuasion. It is not, in my view, unsophisticated to argue that a new technology can circulate over time new information that gives rise to new thinking that destabilizes and reforms old institutions especially if such institutions are set up under false pretenses. One can watch the power elite set up false flags to take advantage of people's credulity regarding the current technologies and the color revolutions and WikiLeaks may be good examples. But what is far more frightening to the elites and far less easily managed is the spread of suppressed knowledge these technologies are fostering. That is where the real damage is being done and the elites can do little or nothing about it. The dawn of the Internet Reformation is upon us all.'

'The Internet Reformation is the culmination of the power and glory of Western civil society and free-market thinking. It is the apogee of all that is best in a sweep of history that began with the ancient Greeks and has culminated in the hearts and minds of millions of young men and women who industriously add to its impact every day via additional code, non-mainstream news or fundamental scientific commentary. Like the radical information that spawned from the Gutenberg press, the impact of the information available to counteract elite modern memes is not immediately visible but over time has a devastating effect. Human beings do have a kind of hive mind (via intimate communications between families and friends and various cultural exchanges) and once additional information is made available, that Mind incorporates it. ...the Internet Reformation will continue to advance, undermining the memes of the powers-that-be and creating eventually an explosion of decentralizing influences.'

'...settled civilization is a fundamentally Gollumizing force. It makes you comfortable, stupid and addicted to the security and accumulated fruits of your labor. ...a settled civilization grows old, stupid and tired, and a vigorous barbarian culture swoops in and takes over from the top, and gradually gets civilized and stupid in turn, until it too is ripe for destruction by pastoral nomads on its periphery. ...intelligence in design is fundamentally a predatory quality put in by barbarian-Masters. Refinement in design is a non-predatory quality put in by civilized-Slaves. We miss this dynamic because of a curious phenomenon: history is only written by the winners if the winners can actually write. At their apogee, when civilizations have the most surplus wealth, they indulge in the most refined forms of writing: writing histories with autocentric conceit, they focus on the visibly-refined glories of their own age, rather than the higher-barbarian sensibilities at the foundations.'

'Electric speeds create centers everywhere...This is the new world of the global village.' -- 'The "human interest" dimension is simply that of immediacy of participation in the experience of others that occurs with instant information.' -- 'Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.'

'We will not have an equitable nor a healthy economy in an information age, until we have information technology which empowers us equitably -- that is decentralized, peer-to-peer and operates by mutual agreement. We are building those technology tools, protocols and platforms. To fully meet our criteria, people need to be able to transact directly with each other with no segment of that interaction relying on a centrally controlled system. #Non-centralized rules (like the rules for money today) #Non-centralized database (as 99.99% are today) #Non-centralized namespace (like DNS) #Non-centralized address space (like IPv4 or IPv6) #Agreements are made by mutual consent #All levels of participation are sovereign -- Currency: a formal system used to shape, enable or measure currents. "If we measure different flows, we start behaving differently."'

'American youth are slowly realizing that the old system is broken, and no longer holds the answer to all their dreams and desires. Together, we’re learning that instead of waiting for politicians and corporations to fix the system, it’s possible to create a better one of our own, right under their noses. A new way of living, in which access is valued over ownership, experience is valued over material possessions, and "mine" becomes “ours” so everyone's needs are met without waste. Consumption is no longer an asymmetrical activity of endless acquisition but a dynamic push and pull of giving and collaborating in order to get what you want. Along the way, the acts of collaboration and giving become an end in itself.' -- Long list of schemes and services. Also: http://www.shareable.net/how-to-share

'...social functionality operate within a space defined by the following three dimensions. #Knowledge: We use this stuff to learn. Specifically, we use it to learn from each other. For example, user reviews or Wikipedia. #Connection: We use this stuff to communicate, bond, meet, define affiliations and dislikes or just hang out where the people are. For example, friending... #Display: We use this stuff to communicate and manage presentations of ourselves, truthfully or not, to others. For example, user profiles or Flickr. No piece of social functionality is all one and none of the others, but they tend to be weighted differently in each case. Display often motivates contributions (and impacts the type of contributions) made via Knowledge and Connection functionality. ...it's crucially important for motivating contribution and can actually stabilize and help self-regulate systems of social functionality. ...the three Display dimensions: Status, Reputation and Esteem – form a continuum.'

'Chart: #The trade-off of ownership for access. Despite the infinite diversity of the human race, we’re actually quite similar in the kind of things we want to achieve on a day-to-day basis and, collectively, we’re beginning to realize that there’s little reason not to share the resources necessary to achieve these goals. With increased connectivity through modern technology, networks at both a global and local level are growing rapidly whilst new communities can develop and flourish through digital channels. These, in turn, allow for resources to be shared, swapped, borrowed, and traded while providing a platform where exclusive belongings are simply irrelevant. Effectively, access to the products or the means to achieve a specific goal has become good enough in these circumstances and a viable and appealing antidote to individual ownership. -- ...elements of trust and reputation become crucial to transactions between nodes...'

'We've learned a ton about how people share and what makes for a trusted, active sharing community. Not surprisingly, it requires a certain level of critical mass in an area to make an active sharing community. We've also learned the importance of groups on the network. When members join and create groups, they feel safe sharing with people they know - people they work with, people in the same apartment building, etc. This helps the network grow and become more useful for everyone. With NeighborGoods 2.0, we're launching a brand new groups feature so members can make private or public sharing communities for organizations, companies and and groups of all sizes. With NeighborGoods 2.0, groups can save thousands of dollars by sharing resources they collectively own.'

'...changes to communication technologies create new possibilities for the self-organisation and self-mobilisation of society, by-passing the barriers of censorship and repression imposed by the state. The issue clearly isn't dependent on technology. Internet is a necessary but not sufficient condition. The roots of rebellion lie in exploitation, oppression and humiliation. However, the possibility of rebelling without being quashed immediately depends on the density and speed of mobilisation and that depends on the ability created by the technologies which I have classified as mass self-communication. -- The important thing to remember about wiki-revolutions (self-generating and self-organising ones), is that leadership doesn't count, they are just symbols. However, these symbols don't have any power, nobody obeys them and neither would they try. Perhaps later on, when the revolution has become institutionalised, some of these people may be co-opted to be a symbol for change...'

'The idea is to write a how-to on building mesh networks. The n00bs must understand it. Mesh networks are usefull, as they cannot be censored nor shut down. Later on that How-to can become part of Anonymous' uber-secret handbook regarding safety.' -- 'The first section of this article will focus on personal safety. Personal safety can be spoken of in two different spheres: Physical Safety and Internet Safety. It is important to remember that these two spheres overlap: a lapse of internet safety could lead to physical identification. However, by keeping in mind a few important rules you can drastically reduce the chance of being singled out and identified. The second section of this article will go into specifics regarding technology that can be used to communicate anonymously, maintain secrecy, and protest effectively.' -- http://goo.gl/SuY0f

'Lisa Gansky, author of "The Mesh," talks about a future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer. Examples across industries -- from music to cars -- show how close we are to this meshy future.'

'They don’t see the world in terms of atomized actors requiring leaders to represent them and organize cooperation, but rather as a vast network of interconnected individuals. In this world, organizing is easy and almost organic, involving not much more than the creation of a Web page, the posting or tweeting of key information to allow likeminded people to converge on the same point at the same time, provide a forum, and assure everyone that they are not alone. ...the message from the young Egyptian protesters is that they are free for the first time in their lives—free not only to speak, but also to organize themselves to meet their own needs. Are they really going to return home to their idle lives and wait patiently for elections? The energy, motivation, and confidence that are now surging through them still need an outlet that cannot be met by politics as usual. And a generation raised on videogames with complex strategies is unlikely to be content with Follow the Leader.'

'What matters in the new era is not your physical wealth, but your reputation. As long as you’ve built up a rep for trustworthiness, there’s no reason you can’t benefit from access to a wealth of products and services when you need them. The trend isn’t entirely new — we’ve had toy libraries since the 1930s...'

'The tribes of the world are uniting. Tied together by the arteries of the information superhighway, citizens of common dreams and common causes are forming human bonds that transcend national borders, religious beliefs and political ideologies. Bigger than blogs and more influential than the social networks, TechnoTribes will rally masses with calls for action when rights are violated, lives threatened and/or change is needed. Distrusting of politicians and critical of their leadership skills, the egalitarian tribes will unite those who share civic interests, follow moral codes and believe in universal truths. These Global Agers will garner wide support from the intellectually disenfranchised that don’t dutifully respect institutional authority or blindly follow the leaders. Whatever the issues, wherever the events, armed with information and filled with data, TechnoTribalists will conclude for themselves what to believe rather than looking to others to be told what to think.'

'New new telcos provided multimedia services across multiple types of device using multiple modalities of communication. And they did everything “over the top”. No infrastructure costs. No on-premise software. And to top it all new new telcos had new new assets, information about relationships and flows. What Facebook call the Friend Graph. -- ...businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products; that they are changing into networks of business units whose assets were called relationships and capabilities. New new assets. Relationships and capabilities. Social capital. Human capital. Assets we have carefully avoided learning how to value. Assets we have refused to value, however much we speak of the importance of talent and knowledge and collaboration. That’s where the new new value is. All just in time for a generation who have rediscovered community.'

'#2. Tasks will be non-linear in nature, rather than assembly-line: When someone new joins a firm, the experience is going to be very similar to that of playing a modern video game. The new joiner will spend time in some form of sandbox or training ground, learning a number of key things: the “game mechanics“, the values, rules and principles by which the firm operates; the “game controls“, how you navigate around the workplace, how you discover things, how you acquire learning and other assets to deploy, how you “save” your work, how you “replay” or “continue”; and the “game dashboard“, the tools that let you see the environment, your powers and authorities, feedback loops on position and progress, primarily team rather than personal, though both are visible. #4. Cognitive surpluses will be put to use sensibly, rather than discarded. #5. Radically different tools and processes will be needed as a result, time-shiftable, place-shiftable, multimedia.'

'We’re going through a process of horizontalising of everything, of “small pieces loosely joined”, of “high cohesion and loose coupling”. Platforms are now no longer hierarchical, they’re closer to being independent layers, often of different sizes and shapes. Attempts to implement end-to-end control in such environments are doomed to fail; in essence there is no point in attempting to tighten what is designed as loose coupling, it doesn’t work. Which is why platforms leak. The horizontalising nature of the internet and the web, of the digital age, needs to be understood. Layers must be independent of each other. Where they are not, the joins will come apart. And leakage will happen. Of course, given what happened with Wikileaks, given what happened with Egypt, there will always be attempts to recreate vertically integrated control. And more leakage will happen. Because the internet, and the web, route around obstacles. By design.'

'America was built by makers – curious, enthusiastic amateur inventors whose tinkering habit sparked whole new industries. At TED@MotorCity, MAKE magazine publisher Dale Dougherty says we're all makers at heart, and shows cool new tools to tinker with, like Arduinos, affordable 3D printers, even DIY satellites.'

The internet is coming.

'... all of our efforts to bring more accessibility, freedom and privacy online are romantic at best, if they continue to rely on the existing, corporately owned and controlled architecture of the internet. A free and open culture needs a free and open architecture. A new spirit of cooperation, openness and transparency is emerging from the internet and reshaping virtually every aspect of our society. It's time for us to permanently weave this spirit into the architecture of the internet itself. A citizen-owned internet will protect our freedoms and privacy, support peer to peer and hyperlocal innovation, and sustain a free and open culture based on cooperation and trust.' -- (Citizen??)

"At electric speed, everything becomes x-ray." -- Electric Age: #1974 End of secrecy #1976 Instantaneous/simultaneous information world #1977 Post-literate generation #1977 Surveillance #1977 Loss of private identity

'McLuhan described how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time. In bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, electric speed heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. -- No chapter in Understanding Media, or later books, contains the idea that the Global Village and the electronic media create unified communities. In fact, in an interview with Gerald Stearn, McLuhan says that it never occurred to him that uniformity and tranquillity were the properties of the Global Village. McLuhan argued that the Global Village ensures maximal disagreement on all points because it creates more discontinuity and division and diversity under the increase of the village conditions. The Global Village is far more diverse.' -- Every village seen globally NOT one globe-spanning village.

'We are NOT looking at a polarity between the state and individuals as witnessed in the 18th, 19th and 20th century ideological confrontations and radicalism. Digitally empowered human beings retain, even more than before, the desire to combine and to work in groups -- in short, to 'belong'! The new feature of digitally driven societies is that they can now do so with amazing speed and effectiveness in defiance of flawed yet established authority. In an age where the internet may seem to have caused ties to the local community to weaken, the digitally- driven society allows individuals a non-duality where they can be part of their local community and at the same time reach out regionally, nationally, and globally to find other groups with which they share common ground. A nation state that prohibits physical assembly of groups forces people to adopt digital interconnections faster and to participate in self-assembling dynamic networks that the internet now makes viable.

'The Internet may be a force for fragmentation rather than consolidation. Just because one is able to connect with others around the world, doesn't mean inevitability that the world draws closer together from a geopolitical standpoint. "Globalization" is an artificial phenomeon driven by an Anglo-American power elite eager to consolidate further power. It seems to us that, absent government coercion, the Internet will continue to empower individuals in terms of direct action and human knowledge. Human beings ultimately use tools to master their own environments, not to create a one-world, ["global villages"]. Only the power elite is truly interested in global governance, so far as we can tell; most people just want to be left alone. We recall that the Gutenberg press gave rise to a rediscovery of ancient knowledge and the vibrant city-states of the Renaissance. This is often how technology operates; it empowers the individual within a chosen society.'

'Bitcoin nodes in the world'

'...something unexpected is happening. We have begun telling each other our own stories. Sharing our lives, our hopes, our dreams, our demons. You cannot sit on the couch playing video games waiting for a revolution. You are the revolution. You have a choice, a choice to take the easy path, the familiar path, to walk willingly into your own submission. Or a choice get up, to go outside and talk to your neighbor, to come together in new forums to create lasting, meaningful change for the human race. This is our challenge: A peaceful revolution, a revolution of ideas, a revolution of creation. The twenty-first century enlightenment. A global movement to create a new age of tolerance and understanding, empathy and respect. An age of unfettered technological development. An age of sharing ideas and cooperation. An age of artistic and personal expression. We can choose to use new technology for radical positive change or let it be used against us. All must be heard.'

'He heralded the global village, and was genuinely excited by its imminence, but he also saw its arrival as the death knell for the literary culture that he revered. The electronically connected society would be the setting not for the further flourishing of civilization but for the return of tribalism. The intellectual detachment that characterizes the solitary thinker—and that was the hallmark of McLuhan’s own work—would be replaced by the communal excitements of what we have today come to call “interactivity.” -- In the fall of 1979, McLuhan suffered another major stroke, but this was one from which he would not recover. Though he regained consciousness, he remained unable to read, to write, or to speak until his death a little more than a year later. A lover of words—his favorite book was Finnegans Wake—he died in a state of wordlessness. He had fulfilled his own prophecy and become physically post-literary.'

"You're going to see a revolution worldwide. What's going to unite them is another major trend: Journalism 2.0. The internet has become the great connector. They all know what's going on."

'...it’s easy to foresee the need for an oversimplified globalized single reputation value, which is one startup that likely aggregates rep systems a la Rotten Tomatoes; followed by a second one that is a rep farming or maintenance exploit startup designed to falsify reputations; followed by another that is a trust verification or exploit detection firm. Clearly, current job sites, certification systems, and university degrees do not adequately serve the need for publicly visible levels and classes. An overall game system, perhaps primed via the flawed reputation system, would allow for a classless system to be built whereby world virtual userplayers could acquire levels in a range of skills. Levels in your top few classes would then be the single most prominently visible thing on your profiles... Subcultures emerge wherein you can create a completely separate identity profile with its own alternate levels...'

'The idea is to inculcate the perception that one is not qualified to make life decisions at any level. Human action must not be taken before the appropriate professional is consulted. As the cult of the expert erodes, society will change. It might be said that the only real expert is the individual himself – and the only determinant of expertise is the way a decision interacts with the market in a real-life context. In a sense, therefore, experts and expertise are a kind of dominant social theme – promoted by the elite. People are taught to defer their own "human action" to those who have advanced degrees and illusory authority. Doctors, scientists, lawyers and politicians – all are to be seen as experts, repositories of hard-won knowledge not available to the ordinary citizen. But in the end, the Invisible Hand will have the final say, not the "expert." The market is the final arbiter. The higher authority is natural law, not an advanced degree.'

'Digital records are the impulses travelling through the nervous systems of dynamic, distributed organisations of all sizes. They are intended, from the beginning, to circulate with ease. Otherwise such organisations would fall apart and dynamism would grind to a halt. The more flexible and distributed organisations become, the more records they need to produce and the faster these need to circulate. Due to their distributed aspect and the pressure for cross-organisational cooperation, it is increasingly difficult to keep records within particular organisations whose boundaries are blurring anyway. People are asked to identify personally with organisations who can either no longer carry historical projects worthy of major sacrifices... This creates the cognitive dissonance that justifies, perhaps even demands, the leaker to violate procedure and actively damage the organisation of which he, or she, has been at some point a well-acculturated member (this is the difference to the spy).'

'...the real lesson of the WikiLeaks affair and subsequent cyberattacks is not how unwieldy the net has become, but rather how its current architecture renders it so susceptible to control from above. ...the internet we know, love and occasionally fear today is more of a beta version of modeling platform than a revolutionary force. And like any new model, it changes the way we think of the way things work right now. What the internet lacks today indicates the possibilities for what can only be understood as a new operating system: a 21st century, decentralized way of conducting political, commercial and human affairs. This new operating system, even in its current form, is slowly becoming incompatible with the great, highly centralized institutions of the 20th century, such as central banking and nation states, which still depend on top-down control and artificial monopolies on power to maintain their authority over business and governance.'

'Former Pirate Bay spokesperson and web entrepreneur Peter Sunde has started a new project -- to offer a decentralised domain name system (DNS) for the web, outside of governmental control. The move comes in response to growing fears among the web community that the US government has too much power over ICANN. -- The idea is to follow the original design of the internet -- a network with no centralised points of failure. The problem, however, is the top-level domains. ICANN currently controls the popular ones. As a result, the project has proposed a new .p2p top-level domain -- requests referring to this domain will be directed to a locally hosted DNS database, whereas other domains will be passed through.'

'A Peace Corps volunteer or perhaps it was an anthropologist in Africa was in a village when satellite TV made it’s debut there. For a period of time, normal village life came to a halt as people watched (slack jawed I imagine) Then slowly, things began to return to some semblance of normality. When asked why people were not watching as much TV, a villager replied, “We have our storyteller." "I understand said the volunteer, “but your storyteller knows a hundred stories, the television knows thousands of stories.” With a gleam in his eye, the man quickly responded, "That is true, but the storyteller knows me!”'

"Instead of thinking, 'Where am I going to go buy that?' they think, 'Oh, I wonder if I can build that?'"

Pay-walled. Recommended. -- When a pyramid scheme nears its inevitable end... "...the public insist on being handed the empty bag because they think they're going to make money, they want in on the game, everyone else has been making money, they feel left out so they insist on buying these things at the peak, and they are the ones who lose everything."

'Real bill circulation will start spontaneously after the total prostration of the world's banking system. Yes, there is life after the sudden death of the banking system. People are not going to commit collective suicide at the altar of fiat currencies. People want to live. They will use whatever little gold is available to them to trade by drawing real bills against the production and distribution of goods they want to consume. It will be a repetition of the miracle at the end of the Middle Ages, when the bill of exchange was invented in Italian city-states such as Florence, Venice and Genoa. It will happen again. The world will do very well with real bills and without banks... When contract law will once again reach the level of highest respect, and promises to pay gold can once again be believed, banks may once again be in vogue. When that day dawns, the best earning assets of the new banks will be real bills drawn on consumer goods in most urgent demand maturing into gold coins.'

'What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange?'

'Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects.'

'You've probably heard already, but The Cuts Are Coming(!) But what and where? The purpose of Where Are The Cuts? is to try to answer that question by mapping what that means on the ground, in real life, at street level. The cuts you see on this site display have all been collected from official sources or entered directly by members of the public. There's no 'official' list of what's being cut where, so we need your help to build up the map. So, if you know about a service that's been cut near you - like a library, or a bus route - or have read about some redundancies at your local council, or that there's suddenly less money for a research programme at a university, you can help build up the Where Are The Cuts? map.'

'When all of our minds collide / You will confide / Everyone stays inside / Penniless golden rush / Government hush / Billions of souls in the crush / Open the heavenly gates / Nobody waits / Nobody contemplates / We are a cog in the wheel / Cut us a deal / What are we supposed to feel? / Automate all of the fears / Scan our tears / We are my eyes and ears / See how the lovers click / Totem to pick / Monitor sexual rhetoric / Up in the swelling storm / You can be born / After we fill out the form / Remotely feed my desire / Intimate liar / Take evolution higher / Take evolution higher'

'Just because we have the ability to invite people into Groups or to check them into Places, we have to consider the social costs of doing so. What is the impact of this action on my relationship with this individual? Does adding them to this Group or checking them into this location hurt or help the stature and value of my position? As an online society of social denizens, we typically underestimate the potential of social networking and the economy that governs it. Social capital is more valuable than we realize and the currency that determines its net worth is represented by our individual social actions and how they accumulate in the short and long term. This is your time to define who you are and the value you behold…' -- 'Groups represents the future of social networking. We can design groups where we communicate, collaborate, and co-create with purpose, whether it’s personally or professionally.'

'Thimbl is a Manifesto for the Open Web written in code. The most significant challenge the open web will need to overcome is not technical, it is political. Welcome to thimbl, the free, open source, distributed micro-blogging platform. If you're tired of being locked in to one micro-blogging platform, or a single social network. Or you're weary of corporations hi-jacking your updates in the pursuit of money, then thimbl is for you.'

'Appleseed is not a Walled Garden. Appleseed provides Open Access to all its users, while maintaining the privacy and security of your data.'

'Ampify is a vision of an open and decentralised social platform. For comparison, perhaps imagine a bastardised mix between Git, Facebook, Unix, IRC, App Engine, Xanadu and Wikis.'

'What Moglen presented was less an abstract theory than a beautiful, hypnotic manifesto... Gullible civilians—the ordinary users of Facebook, iPhones, and Gmail—had given themselves up to the spymasters. Because they didn’t understand their own machines, or code itself, they’d been brainwashed into believing this was a fair trade, convinced their natural role was to be clients, reliant on servers. At the center of the speech was a call to arms, aimed at those who had the tools ordinary users lacked. Geeks spoke the language that made things happen. (There’s a reason some coders call programs “incantations” and “daemons.”) These powers could catalyze freedom, rather than take it away. “What we need is to make a thing that is so greasy there will never be another social-networking platform again,” Moglen announced, to applause. “Right? Can we do it? Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, if you don’t have a date on Friday night, let’s just have a hackfest and get it done.”'

'The old verities of life still seem the soundest to us. Learn a trade, participate in local or regional industry, re-involve oneself in family farming. These are perhaps sounder lifestyles than those modernity has offered. The impetus of the power elite has been ever to shove people into cities where they are helpless to fend for themselves and suffer from the vagaries of the boom/bust job market. This has been the fate of American (and European) Baby Boomers, who were taught by public schools that the modern lifestyle was a sophisticated one and that white-collar jobs were far more valuable than blue collar ones. But, as we have long pointed out, it was all a kind of Dreamtime. Government is not going to care for anyone. Regulatory democracies are ultimately run by shadowy elites who are interested in their own pocketbooks; the myth of a caring government or politician is just that – a myth.'

'Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters. ...any people who legitimately enjoy all the trappings on hipsterhood must psychologically distance themselves from the demographic group of which they are so clearly a part. And so their subconscious brains have to work double time so that they can convince themselves that the things they buy do not reflect on their true character. The deeper irony is that those who try to assert their independence from the commodification of identity wind up tapping into another marketplace myth, what the authors call "the myth of consumer sovereignty." This is the idea that by assiduously selecting from all the identity markers available for purchase, a person can assemble one that authentically reflects their true self independent of the marketplace.'

'Instead of implicitly checking into different spots like you do with Foursquare and Gowalla, or broadcasting everywhere you go in the background like you do with Google Latitude, Neer creates geo-fences that trigger location updates to your inner circle. With Neer, you create a geo-fence around certain places like home, work, or school simply by marking them on your phone when you are there. Entering or leaving the location triggers an update message to your inner circle. Rather than seeing where you are on a map, all they see is the name you’ve given each place.'

'Reward your fans for visiting your web site and sharing your content. Let visitors to your web site and your Twitter followers unlock badges + earn points.' -- Creator describes it as "Foursquare for the web."

'A group of Dutch coders called Urban Edibles has built an "augmented foraging" application for Android phones. It's called Boskoi, and helps people find natural sources of food in urban environments. Locations of food can be tagged on a map, as well as information about the source, such as which parts of the plant are safe to eat or what it tastes good with.' -- Foursquare Hungry Forager Edition, Foursquare Starving Cannibal Edition, Foursquare Thirsty Zombie Edition...

'“The biggest problem if you’re trying to figure out ‘What is this stuff? What are they trying to do?’ is that I think even they don’t completely have a grip on it,” Scott says. “This thing — the Internet, online culture — allows you to engage with interesting people who you otherwise might not be aware of or interesting people who are, themselves, unaware that they’re interesting.” ...BuzzFeed is organized by its readers’ shorthand response to what they view — sections include LOL and OMG. “The way people interact with media is more about someone’s reaction, an emotional or even intellectual reaction,” Peretti says. “That is a kind of cultural shift. It’s not ‘I love to read the Style section,’ it’s ‘I love all the LOL stuff.’ ” “You see the news break,” Peretti says, and “the next day or 12 hours later, people are hungry for the parody of it or the comic relief.” '

The Gutenberg Galaxy: 'The world has become a computer, an electronic brain... And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time... In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.'

Robb: "MEND's (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta) disruption campaign, yielded tens of trillions of dollars in global economic damage for tens of thousands of dollars spent on making the attacks. That's a return on investment (ROI) of 1,000,000,000%. How do nation-states survive when an unknown guerrilla group in a remote corner of the world can generate returns on that magnitude? They don't. -- What are the global drivers that make resiliency important? Simply: stability, prosperity, and security is going away. You will soon find you are on your own, if you haven't already. If you do nothing, you will suffer the predations of gangs, militias, and corrupt bureaucracies that will fill the void left by retreating nation-states. If you want to avoid this fate, you can build resilient communities... Produce everything you can locally. Virtualize everything else. Think in terms of vibrant local economic ecosystems that are exceedingly efficient, productive, and bountiful."