Tag: Democracy

“About TZM: The Zeitgeist Movement is a global sustainability activist group working to bring the world together for the common goal of species sustainability before it is too late. Divisive notions such as nations, governments, races, political parties, religions, creeds or class are non-operational distinctions in the view of The Movement. Rather, we recognize the world as one system and the human species as a singular unit, sharing a common habitat.”

“Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity’s most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual freedom and civic virtue requires us to achieve specific free technology and free culture goals. Our existing achievements in these directions are under assault from companies trying to bottleneck human communications or own our common culture, and states eager to control their subjects’ minds. In this talk–one of a series beginning with “The dotCommunist Manifesto” and “Die Gedanken Sind Frei”–I offer some suggestions about how the Free World should meet the challenges of the next decade.”

❝ In their bestseller Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams showed the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses commu­nicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace.

This sequel shows that in more than a dozen fields—from finance to health care, science to education, the media to the environment—we have reached a historic turning point. Collaborative innovation is revolutionizing not only the way we work, but how we live, learn, create, govern, and care for one another. The wiki revolutions of the Arab Spring were only one example of how rebuilding civilization was not only possible but necessary.

With vivid examples from diverse sectors, Macrowikinomics is a hand­book for people everywhere seeking a transformation of industry and institu­tions by embracing a new set of guiding principles, including openness and interdependence. Tapscott and Williams argue that this new communications medium, like the printing press before it, is enabling nothing less than the birth of a new civilization. ❞

Computers & Society, NYU. Following is the foreword, by Douglas Alexander, to Rushkoff’s paper on the same topic:

“The internet has become an integral part of our lives because it is interactive. That means people are senders of information, rather than simply passive receivers of ‘old’ media. Most importantly of all, we can talk to each other without gatekeepers or editors. This offers exciting possibilities for new social networks, which are enabled – but not determined – by digital technology.

In the software industry, the open source movement emphasises collective cooperation over private ownership. This radical idea may provide the biggest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft. Open source enthusiasts have found a more efficient way of working by pooling their knowledge to encourage innovation.

All this is happening at a time when participation in mainstream electoral politics is declining in many Western countries, including the US and Britain. Our democracies are increasingly resembling old media, with fewer real opportunities for interaction.

What, asks Douglas Rushkoff in this original essay for Demos, would happen if the ‘source code’ of our democratic systems was opened up to the people they are meant to serve? ‘An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us to confront the issues of our time,’ he answers.

That’s a profound thought at a time when governments are recognising the limits of centralised political institutions. The open source community recognises that solutions to problems emerge from the interaction and participation of lots of people, not by central planning.

Rushkoff challenges us all to participate in the redesign of political institutions in a way which enables new solutions to social problems to emerge as the result of millions interactions. In this way, online communication may indeed be able to change offline politics.”

❝ A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, “democratic transhumanism,” by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human – “posthuman” or “transhuman” – the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. ❞

❝ Noted media pundit and author of Playing the Future Douglas Rushkoff gives a devastating critique of the influence techniques behind our culture of rampant consumerism. With a skilled analysis of how experts in the fields of marketing, advertising, retail atmospherics, and hand-selling attempt to take away our ability to make rational decisions, Rushkoff delivers a bracing account of media ecology today, consumerism in America, and why we buy what we buy, helping us recognize when we’re being treated like consumers instead of human beings. ❞

❝ (Excerpt) In addition, there were the politics that plagued our ecstatic enterprises themselves, no matter how we twisted and squirmed to escape it. Many a commune, demonstration, or love-in wrecked on the twin shoals of property and control. Then, too, there were the political fires kindled by the friction of latter-day ecstasy cults rubbing up against the stiff hide of the old iguana-brained Establishment.

It is an understatement to write that Timothy Leary was privy to this stormy marriage of the mundane and the rapturous. Simultaneously observer and participant, Dr. Leary analyzed events around him even as he helped make them happen. Boundlessly energetic, keenly insightful, he was uniquely qualified to work both sides of Heisenberg Street. Imagine him studiously taking notes even as he skated on one foot along the vibrating rim of an indole ring. ❞

❝ When first published, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century. This edition of McLuhan’s best-known book both enhances its accessibility to a general audience and provides the full critical apparatus necessary for scholars. In Terrence Gordon’s own words, “McLuhan is in full flight already in the introduction, challenging us to plunge with him into what he calls ‘the creative process of knowing.'” Much to the chagrin of his contemporary critics McLuhan’s preference was for a prose style that explored rather than explained. Probes, or aphorisms, were an indispensable tool with which he sought to prompt and prod the reader into an “understanding of how media operates” and to provoke reflection.

In the 1960s McLuhan s theories aroused both wrath and admiration. It is intriguing to speculate what he might have to say 40 years later on subjects to which he devoted whole chapters such as Television, The Telephone, Weapons, Housing and Money. Today few would dispute that mass media have indeed decentralized modern living and turned the world into a global village. ❞