Defragmenting our selves
Curious things keep happening in UK and US politics. The pundits are puzzled: why do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn exist? Why Brexit? A collective madness has settled over the populations of these countries, is the impression you might get from reading seasoned commentators. Ordinary people keep deciding things that make no sense to those who rule…
I picked up Lovink’s book Networks without a cause quite by chance in the library the other day and discovered him talking about ‘organised networks’. Most participatory platforms emphasize a model of weak links (think ‘friends of friends’) that attract a community just to ‘hang out’, conveniently for the corporations that exploit our social relationships….
In this video Orson Welles makes a proposal for an organisation. The video is worth watching from about 1.30. The description of the organisation starts at 4.28 if you are particularly time-poor today. While hedging about his proposal with all kinds of caveats to show that what he is suggesting is not based on radical…
What Avaaz and the likes of 38 degrees have done recently is use the internet and social media to build large national/global networks of campaign activists who can be called upon at a moments notice to do this or that. This is probably a good thing. But is Avaaz as innovative as it could be?…