Yule Heibel's Library tagged democracy →  View Popular, Search in Google

Fantastic article. Eben Moglen's ideas tie in well with Lewis Hyde's on common wealth and copyright. More power to them.
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"We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” [Moglen] said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”
(...)
In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.
(...)
Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.

In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year hav

eben_moglen internet freedom security democracy software

Yes, how is Obama fighting against these guys?
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When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.
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obama politics democracy

Wise and entertaining lecture about how Aristotle still has lots to teach us.
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Democracy thrives on civil debate, Michael Sandel says -- but we're shamefully out of practice. He leads a fun refresher, with TEDsters sparring over a recent Supreme Court case (PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin) whose outcome reveals the critical ingredient in justice.
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michael_sandel democracy justice resources aristotle harvard video ted_conference

This is the structure/ set-up that Andres Duany would like to see used for making (urban) land use decisions. It's certainly very different (and much better) than the City of Victoria's new set-up (using Citizen Advisory Councils [or Panels] - which are much more limited, meet endlessly over months, aren't remunerated for their time, and are hand-picked by the mayor, and don't report out with minutes of their meetings!).
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What Is a Citizens Jury?
In a Citizens Jury project, a randomly selected and demographically representative panel of citizens meets for four or five days to carefully examine an issue of public significance. The jury of citizens, usually consisting of 18–24 individuals, serves as a microcosm of the public. Jurors are paid a stipend for their time. They hear from a variety of expert witnesses and are able to deliberate together on the issue. On the final day of their moderated hearings, the members of the Citizens Jury present their recommendations to decision-makers and the public. Citizens Jury projects can be enhanced through extensive communication with the public, including a dynamic web presence and significant media contacts.
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citizen_juries cities democracy participation jefferson_center

Excellent article by John Geraci on how/why "the long tail" analogy has to come alive in cities, and what it would mean.
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Most cities right now are models of closed, rigid systems, systems that rely on a few, top-performing agents to get civic tasks done and keep quality of life high for residents. Most of these agents are departments of the city itself, though some are outsourced. Either way, cities rely on one agent per issue, no more. (...)
...imagine instead a city that has totally open, unrestricted access to data (say, San Francisco or DC in 2011). What does it look like? It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they've always provided - that's not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM's Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities - they're used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better. But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.
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It's interesting to think about the differences between Canada and the US here. In the US, all government data is owned by the people - governments can't keep it back. But in Canada, all government data is owned by the Crown. That means, Canadians have to first get someone in authority to grant them access to it and they have to get permission to use it. #fail #deadendfeudalism

john_geraci cities data open_source democracy long_tail o'reilly

I posted this to my Facebook "notes" already, but it's such a great piece it needs to go on Diigo and the blog, too.

A must-read, especially for "the rest of us," analysis and commentary from Rebecca MacKinnon on what it was like at the July 08 FutureBrainstorm Tech conference at Half Moon Bay in California...

Among the things MacKinnon discusses, there's the question of what might happen to internet freedoms in some (engineered or actual) post i-9/11 "event".

And of course there's the matter of "benevolent dictators," which her title already alludes to. The "benevolent dictators are the guys currently running the major internet apps / venues. Reading MacKinnon's article, I was reminded of early "cradle to grave" type paternalistic capitalists -- for example, the people who ran Beverly, Mass.'s United Shoe Machinery Corporation, the first-ever company named in anti-trust suits way back in the very early years of the 20th (!!) century. Notably, not all mid- to late-19th and early-20th century capitalists fit the bill of the caricatured "Robber Baron" -- some were "benevolent." (Or paternalistic.) But when push came to shove, it didn't last.

Neither will this model?

rebecca_mackinnon web_2.0 capitalism business democracy socialcritique

More like this, please:

I so WANT this for Victoria: an online feedback tool to rate your city's councilors. So far available only for Toronto and Vancouver, but, one hopes, soon to expand to other Canadian cities.

PS: of course you can rate your mayor, too.
via Spacing.ca (http://spacing.ca/wire/2008/06/27/rate-your-councillor/)

local_government polls councillors web_2.0 democracy

Informative review of Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. It's intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It's almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people "sorting" themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting? :)

Also of course fascinating in Stossel's review/ Bishop's book are the observations on "the big sort"'s effect on politics, and that homogenous communities tend to be more cantakerous because they're so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogenous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes "solutions" less "obvious," but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things -- vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING -- going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely *must* think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it "hurts" what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They're totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the "different" communities

big_sort demographics democracy trends bill_bishop

Oh, fuck Canada, fuck the CBC, eh?:
"Mr. Geist also noted that in schools or libraries, the U.S. laws would prevent students from making copies of material they use for research purposes.

But he and some industry stakeholders have acknowledged that Canada should adopt some elements of the U.S. legislation that offer flexibility for the "fair use" of intellectual property. They say that under the existing laws in Canada, a person could be sued for producing a parody of a politician based on real images, sound or video, or even for recording a television program.

The restrictions recently prompted the popular on demand Internet video site, YouTube.com, to remove a parody of the former president of the CBC appearing at parliamentary hearings because of a complaint from the speaker of the House of Commons."

Boo-hoo, a speaker of the House of Commons commonly complained about a parody, and it had to be taken off YouTube? This takes the biscuit.

Canada, land of tutelage and lords, even if they are common as dirt.

canada copyfight democracy internet_neutrality

The title says it all. I'm an American citizen, and Hoover's ilk just makes me sick. What an unbelievable pig he was, and how shockingly he treated American citizenship... Today we have Bush Jr and his cronies following in Hoover's wake: "Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today." Pfui, J. Edgar Hoover, and pfui to all your ilk.

america civil_rights democracy fascist_tendencies fbi j_edgar_hoover liberty