Category — Political Economy

Socialist Project -» Theory & Debate:
Ernest MandelA life for the revolution

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for those of you interested in political economy, marxist political economy or otherwise.

TED | Speakers | Andrew Mwenda:
Andrew Mwenda: Journalist

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Intentions are usually problematic… people act under good intentions at all times.

Even GWB thought he was doing the right thing, remember that, good intentions are not always the best thing. Mr. Mwenda speaks about the problem of foreign aid and the problem of structural motivation and economics. I think he nails the african situation on the head. I like his example of if you have 10 ph.d.’s they will never be as effective as an entrepreneur in the market. I’m not sure that’s true, but I think it is closer to true than not.

It was the only right (ethical) choice that I had. You see I went down to google’s new york office tonight to see a colleague of mine speak on the future of the internet. I thought it was an open invite without any specific rules as to what I could do with the knowledge that I found there. I registered and attended until Google asserted the rules.

Sometimes… Google gets it wrong. You see I did not have any prior ruleset to know that they do not allow people to blog or otherwise publish their visit to such talks. They did not send one, it was not in any announcement that I received, and I’ve otherwise not seen one. However, there is a set of rules that prohibit blogging or publishing that they announced before the talk. Google said that if i wanted to blog or publicly discuss the event, I had to get their permission. If I’d have known, I would not have attended or been affiliated with the event in any way. I am a professor, was and still am, and by the very nature of my job, i cannot guarantee that I will follow their rules about publication or blogging. I couldn’t consent to them, so I had to leave. I don’t want to have to ask google for permission to speak about something that I already know a good deal about and am perfectly happy dashing an email off to colleagues to learn more. I don’t want to be obliged to them for any intellectual content or public knowledge at all beyond the general service they provide.

The rational that google said justified this request for secrecy and the privatization of knowledge was one of collegiality. I found that justification to be ironic. Colleagues share within the limits of their judgment. Collegiality is broken as soon as the judgment is turned into a ruleset, as soon as trust becomes moot and i no longer have to trust you, instead i just have to trust that you are following the pre-ordained rules. At that point in time of the announcement of rules, anyone in the room could be called colleagues, afterwards we were all subjects to Google and any collegiality was limited by Google’s rules. We were all constructed as lesser beings, less equal, more likely to damage others. We were ‘other’, and untrustworthy, which is the implication of the ‘no blogging’. If you want people to be friends, to become a community, you have to let them communicate, you have to let them establish the common ground by consent.

Thus I had to leave, as I was not going to be subject of Google beyond what I’ve already contracted. I could not consent to silence. I am surprised that the speaker in question would allow this rule, but not that surprised in the end.

Please if you have a talk where people who take ethics seriously are present, never change the rules after the fact, make them public beforehand.

Now I know 2 things,
1. Google changes the rules of public engagement to suit it’s own interpretations
2. Before I attend any future Google event, I should ask for clearly defined rules to be made public and distributed, so that I can decide to either be complicit or not beforehand.

Spy Chips:
This book will make you look at every store-bought item you own or debate owning with a curious skepticism that — after reading the book — won’t seem too unwarranted. It was published two years ago (a cheap paperback came out in the fall), but if you’ve yet to explore the fascinating, potentially paranoia-inducing, world of RFID and you want the cautionary, consumer-advocate perspective about the Radio Frequency Identification tracking being proposed — and used! — by certain companies (for instance, Gillette, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart)

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this could be an interesting book.

Top Ten Issues of One Laptop Per Child:
1. The Community of Learning vs. The Cult of the North American Individual: The name OLPC is a problem as the focus is on Personal Computers for Individuals ignoring the fact that community feedback is crucial part of learning. Self directed learning cannot be effective without feedback from peers, parents and teachers.

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number one… hits the cultural issue squarely on the head.. should we be exporting our social anomie, individualism, and ‘aculturalization as informationalization’? should we? to what end?

The Living Edge:
David Sifry has just put up The State of the Live Web, April 2007. To explain the Live Web, he points to a pair of pieces I wrote in 2005. If you’d like a more visual explanation, follow the slides from this talk I gave at OSCON last summer, starting here.

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Doc points toward Dave’s use of some of his work in the live web and more important the communal or collective web as compared to what might be thought of as the individualistic web. Of course, in my view, the www is a policy regime, a device that constrains and constructs relationships, not merely among data, but primarily among humans. The current transformation of the web into user-generation and user-integration is fascinating because it is making possible a much broader mode of awareness, communication, and community construction.

Freedom for IP:
Ignite Seattle Video

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this is a good presentation about intellectual freedom, the the freedom to create and innovate.

Francis Wheen | Top 10s | Guardian Unlimited Books:
2. The market is rationalFinancial sophisticates in the 21st century smile at the madness of the South Sea Bubble or the absurdity of the Dutch tulip craze. Yet only a few years ago they scrambled and jostled to buy shares in dotcom companies which had no earnings at all nor any prospect of ever turning a profit. To justify this apparent insanity, they maintained that such a revolutionary business as the internet required a new business model in which balance sheets were irrelevant. In short, they thought they had repealed the laws of financial gravity – until they came crashing down to earth.

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ahhh, modern delusions….

The $100 laptop: What went wrong – MSN Money:

Anyway, in general a free computer to everyone on the planet it interesting. The tool is cool. And there are many massively problematic issues involved. But that’s interesting is that this article is publishe din MSN Money. MSN isn’t part of this. I’ve read the M$ does not like open source. I wonder how much big computing, like big oil and big tobacco is willing to thumb the nose at doing something good (Gate’s work on aids in africa is not part of this debate of course) useful when it might get in the way of a little well planned out hegemony. But that’s just my personal opinion on it.

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This is one place where i disagree with Jason. The ‘cool tool’ is not a solution, it is a distraction from more serious infrastructural and educational issues and the ‘leapfrog’ of those infrastructures that it ‘represents’ actually will be impossible. I don’t think big computing is actually against this, in fact, most of them have bought in. You see, you don’t sell these things to people… You sell them to governments and the money that comes from governments will be be backed by other governments, so there is no real possibility of profit/loss . The economics of this project looks great, I think, for companies. The future of these objects as computers… is not great. The design is completely wrong for any use outside of a clean, classroom environment. It has too many moving parts and it is ‘american cool’ instead of globally useful. If you look at army troop laptops, designs that actually work in diverse environments…. they do not look like this and there is a good reason for that….. Design is one issue with OLPC, but there are certainly major socio-political implications… I’ve written on that before here. I think… OLPC is a bad program and mainly exists as a promotional tool. Putting the same money into the Million-book project’s bookmobiles would be far more productive.

Largest archive of free culture to be built in the Netherlands:
From the Netherlands, the “Images for the Future” project is building a large-scale conservation and digitization project to make available 285,000 hours of film, television, and radio recordings, as well as more than 2.9 million photos from the Netherlands’ film and television archives. A basic collection drawn from the archive will be made available on the Internet either under CC licenses, or in some cases, in the public domain. The Government of the Netherlands, a long time supporter of the local Dutch CC project, will invest a total of 173 million Euros over a seven-year period. Their aim is to spur innovative applications with new media, while providing valuable services to the public.
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this will be great… free content is the backbone of innovation and production.