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Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason
by Kevin Flanagan 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_i… We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood. What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic? My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves. At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for. In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted: 1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future 2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany. 3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable. 4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected. 5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman. 6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton. 7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes. 8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these. 9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect. 10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them. 11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection. 12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history. 13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village. 14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week. 15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline. 16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak. 17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot. 18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed. 19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites. 20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual. Some complications.... a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such. b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters. c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world. d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out. e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters. (For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.) That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments. Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen below.

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Fwd: We Can Fix Our Economy!
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

hi thomas, are you familiar with this? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Stephen Clark <realityofmoney(a)yahoo.com> Date: Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:39 AM Subject: We Can Fix Our Economy! To: realityofmoney(a)yahoo.com *Hello,* *The New Book <http://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1450553397> Provides a Wake-up Call to Americans in a declining economy.* *Reality Of Money and The Federal Reserve<http://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1450553397>b **y Stephen Clark and Frank Wallace explores the prime cause for America’s national debt and outlines the steps needed to reverse it.* *If knowledge truly is power, then this book<http://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1450553397>carries more than its fair share to inform the American people on the alarming pattern of corruption and unfair usury practiced in the United States each and every day.* *Here are a few of the documented potential benefits of government issued, debt-free **money spent, not loaned into circulation:* *1. **Usury (unfair, scripturally immoral, compounded, ballooning or excessive interest) will be abolished and the banking industry will be like any other business in a truly free enterprise system, practicing competitive banking.* *** * *2. Public debt will eventually be reduced to zero with governments earning interest on account balances rather than paying interest on debt. * * * *3. Boom and bust cycles will permanently disappear.* *4. **Bankruptcies, foreclosures, business failures, and unemployment will no longer be the tools used to balance prosperity.* *5. **Graduating students will not be forced to start their lives saddled with thousands of dollars of debt, which actually can remove the incentive to get an education. * *6. **Universal health care will be a reality. No one will lose their home going bankrupt over medical bills. * * * *7. **The national public infrastructure of roads, bridges, levees, dams, transportation, education and information systems, the space program, the arts and the military can all be adequately funded. * * * *8. **Relief can be provided for those affected by the occurrence of natural and other disasters without increasing their debt.* * * *9. **All working people will benefit by being able to afford homes and cars and will enjoy a comfortable and dignified retirement. * * * *10. **Unlimited opportunities for jobs will be created.* *When the American people understand the proper function of government issued, debt-free money that is spent, not loaned with interest into circulation for the common good, and act to politically secure it, this nation, under moral right, will finally have a new birth of freedom and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. * * * *This is the true American Dream as envisioned by the Founders in the Constitution.** * * * *If you want to help please forward this message along to all of the people in your address book, because we can fix our economy! * * * *Please visit the website, Reality of Money <http://www.realityofmoney.org/>, to learn more. **www.RealityofMoney.org* P.S. Please give this serious consideration. This book will help any person with or without a degree in economics to understand our country's monetary system and what we as a group need to do to fix it. When we all stand together we will make our voices heard. Sincerely, Belinda Clark ** ------------------------------ avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com>: Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 101129-1, 11/29/2010 Tested on: 11/29/2010 8:28:48 PM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2010 ALWIL Software. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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non-us centric sharing
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

http://www.dnaindia.com/speakup/report_innovating-to-connect-the-dots-for-s… -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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wealth of nature
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

Hi Bill, if you ever read this and take notes, I'd love to publish them: http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4093 -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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quoting sepp on open mesh progress
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

http://boomeroo.org/?p=5032 -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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debunking the debt virus hypothesis
by Michel Bauwens 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

hi sepp, this article by ardeshir is too technical for us, but if you want to comment on it or mention it, that'd be great (this is part of that bibo controversy), of course, no problem if not, Michel http://homepage.mac.com/ardeshir/DebunkingTheDebt-VirusHypothesis.html there is a fairly common thesis, based on the fact that money is loaned into existence as interest-bearing debt, that if new loans are not continually being issued in ever-increasing amounts, enough money will not be created to pay the interest on existing loans; and as a result, at least some those loans will be defaulted upon. In essence, the thesis is that if an amount P is created as the principal of a loan (or of a combination of loans), the loan(s) cannot be fully paid back if the total amount of the debt exceeds P – as is necessarily the case when interest is charged. In other words, there would not be enough money in the economy to pay off the entire debt, and therefore some of the borrowers must perforce default. This is claimed to be an inherent feature of the system of interest-based debt itself, and to have nothing to do with the ability of the borrowers to earn enough to pay back their loans. The thesis claims that even if all borrowers could earn enough, by dint of hard or smart work, to pay back their loans, there simply would not be enough money in the economy to enable them all to do so: some of them would *have* to be unable to pay back their loans. In different forms this thesis has been enunciated here<http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel/bankmath.htm>and here <http://bibocurrency.org/> – among other places. The thesis is sometimes called the “debt-virus” hypothesis. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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access to communication in emergencies
by Michel Bauwens 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

hi sepp, can you have a look at this one: http://gwob.org/about/ -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Benjamin Mako Hill's presentation about "Antifeatures" in the FTA NOW!
by Franco Iacomella 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

Benjamin Mako Hill is offering a virtual Guest Lecture at the Free Technology Academy during the next two weeks. It's entitled "Antifeatures" and anyone is invited to watch the video presentation and participate in the debate with Mako and other members of the FTA Community. Enter to the classroom: http://campus.ftacademy.org/course/view.php?id=35&username=guest If you want to actively participate, please register in the FTA Campus: http://campus.ftacademy.org/login/index.php Benjamin Mako Hill is a Debian hacker, intellectual property researcher, activist and author. He is a free software developer and contributes to the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He's also the author of two best-selling technical books on the subject. He currently serves as a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors and of Wikimedia Foundation's board. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab and is currently a Senior Researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he studies free software communities and business models. More about the Free Technology Academy: http://www.ftacademy.org -- Franco Iacomella

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Fwd: [p2p-research] Legislation for Urban Agriculture in Pittsburgh PA passes
by Michel Bauwens 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

franco: still getting p2p-research mails it seems ... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Samuel Rose <samuel.rose(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 9:56 PM Subject: [p2p-research] Legislation for Urban Agriculture in Pittsburgh PA passes To: Peer-To-Peer Research List <p2presearch(a)listcultures.org> Sent to me from http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=620756280 via facebook email "It seems the city has passed legislation for having bees,chickens,and urban gardens-there is a grant fund -I think to help pay for permits -but I don't know the details-I pasted Janas e mail here with some info: Hello, The council did pass the version of the ordinance as we saw it in August of 2010 so chickens and bee are in. It now sits for ten days from the date of voting, Jan 26, and then becomes law(the mayor could sign it and speed things up). Also passed was the Urban Agriculture Education Fund, offered up from Councilman Peduto. It is $30,000 to help pay the fees associated with getting through the Zoning Office for the right to have these animals or sell your produce. All I know so far is what was in the motion. It is below. It looks like our individual neighborhood organizations are going to have to hold educational classes and then distribute monies. It's pretty smart, the neighborhood organization decides if they are going to actively support urban farming. So once again, this is all I know. I have a call in to Mr. Peduto's office to learn more. Will let you know. Thank you all for your different ways of helping throughout this time, I appreciate it. Jana Thompson Section 1. The Mayor and the Director of the Department of City Planning, on behalf of the City of Pittsburgh, are hereby authorized to enter into an Agreement or Agreements with community organization/s to offer grants/assistance to applicants who take proper training in urban agriculture in various neighborhoods of the City in an amount not to exceed $30,000.00, chargeable to and payable from the following account: Urban Agriculture Education Fund. Org. 110000, Fund 6100, BY 2011, Subclass PGHPR, P/G 2267418, Acct. 000000." --end quote -- -- -- Sam Rose Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email: samuel.rose(a)gmail.com http://forwardfound.org http://futureforwardinstitute.org http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://socialmediaclassroom.com "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan _______________________________________________ p2presearch mailing list p2presearch(a)listcultures.org http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: [fcforum] signatory for Brasil
by Michel Bauwens 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Simona Levi <info(a)conservas.tk> Date: Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 4:24 AM Subject: [fcforum] signatory for Brasil To: fcforum_discussion(a)list.fcforum.net, fcforum(a)list.fcforum.net The colleagues from Brasil ask to fcforum participants to sign to defend the participative copyright law: http://www.cartaaberta.org.br ----- + info http://list.fcforum.net/wws/info/fcforum ------- -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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