Hi Pedro,
 
Thanks for pointing to this...
 
I was aware of Zeynep's paper but frankly could see little point in engaging directly with that discussion.  To my mind Michel (and Zeynep's) arguments are essentially academic (in the worst sense) and self-fulfilling/circular... Any social movement will "inevitably" do such and such, why, because at some point they stop being movements and therefore need to transition to something else and that something else is by definition structured and thus "oligarchic" or whatever. (The arguments are "academic" in that the terms on which the discussion is engaged are self-defined and thus the subsequent discussion is limited within these definitions and of course, that being the case the author can prove whatever they choose to prove (Alice's argument with the Queen in Alice in Wonderland)--the result to my mind is a similar result to most such academic arguments--the author shows themselves to be both clever and irrelevant!)
 
Zeynep's paper is rather cleverer than most (it at least uses data rather than simply anecdote) but is equally disempowering and in practice preposterous.  What would be the consequences for action in Egypt if the active agents were to take the argument seriously... They would all go home and leave the field to Mubarek since why bother to waste blood replacing one oligarchy with another.
 
My point was rather something different that is, what can we learn from what was done that can be transferred forward into the process of reconstruction... There will of course, need to be stability and structures of some sort but there is one (and perhaps two) differences from previous revolutions. The one difference is the use of ICTs which allow for some rather profoundly different/transformational organizational processes.  The second partial difference is that there is now a "memory" or self-consciousness concerning the failures of previous revolutions and with this self-consciousness comes the possibility of overcoming this--I don't believe that anything is social behaviour is inevitable! and neither should anyone who is in any sense involved with or sympathetic to the idea of p-2-p!
 
Best,
 
Mike

Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
Director: Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training
Vancouver, CANADA
http://www.communityinformatics.net
CA tel. +1-604-602-0624

-----Original Message-----
From: Pedro Gioya [mailto:pg@institutodeliderazgo.com]
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 5:30 PM
To: P2P Foundation mailing list; Michael Gurstein
Cc: p2p-foundation; Dougald Hine
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels?

Hi
Look at this post on the same issue but with different  perspective (Sure you know, but anyway....)
http://technosociology.org/?p=366
 
Pedro
----- Original Message -----
From: Michel Bauwens
To: Michael Gurstein
Cc: p2p-foundation ; Dougald Hine
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 6:52 PM
Subject: Re: [P2P-F] FW: Blogpost: Applying the ICT Lessons of Revolt to the Institutional Challenges of Reconstruction: They overthrew Hosni Mubarek, Now Can They Overthrow Robert Michels?

This is really brilliant Michael and I warmly recommend it to our listmembers,

Michel

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Michael Gurstein <gurstein@gmail.com> wrote:
Michel,

I think this is one that you will find interesting...

M

---------------------------------------------
http://wp.me/pJQl5-5Z

"In this, I think that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia have access to
skills and resources which were unavailable to earlier movements that is-the
Internet, social networking, mobile telephony and perhaps most important,
the experience and knowledge of how to use these in support of collective
social ends."




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