Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.my article at the Atlantic Community
Check out my article at the Atlantic Community. I am back on the grid and will be posting regularly again.
off the social graph (to get married)
I will be offline for most of next week at the farmhouse, to prepare for the wedding. I might be trying mobile blogging (thoughts from the old country), but do read Brad Fitzpatrick’s “Thoughts on the Social Graph,” he focuses on the most interesting meta-political problem of our time…
political entrepreneurship
What do the concepts driving Web 2.0 like Longtail, Free, the economics of non-scarce resources share? They are inherently political. And that is not surprising, but it means that political theory needs to get involved into the debate and the next group of internet startups will be headed by political entrepreneurs, shaping and growing networked communities.
search and discovery
Do you remember the feeling of browsing through the stacks of your university library and by chance stumbling upon the book that saved your paper? This is the idea behind stumbleupon. The bigger question is what is the relationship between search and discovery? What will future discovery-engines look like? And what will that mean for society? And political theory?
The Ignored Elephant: Mexico in the Atlantic Community
When we think of the Atlantic Community, we think of Europe and the United States. In the 1990s a movement to include a focus on Canada, when studying North-Atlantic relations, has been fairly successful and has added value to the discourse. Mexico, however, even today, is under-appreciated in the U.S., transatlantic, and German policy discourses. The challenge is to map the issue areas in which Mexico impacts European-U.S. relations, where it should not be ignored, if one wants to fully describe, understand, and shape transatlantic policy processes.
Mexico is an interesting case of an ignored elephant. It is a fairly big country with 105 Million inhabitants. It is an OECD-country, with a GDP per capita that is around 10 times that of China. Around 10% of the U.S. population is of Mexican descent. Mexico is one of the main oil-producing countries of the world. The richest man in the world is from Mexico, Mexican multinational companies like CEMEX control most of the market for “building solutions†in both the U.S. and Germany. German industry, especially automotive companies have major manufacturing bases in Mexico to comply with NAFTA local content rules and to be closer to the U.S. market. And Mexico is the main supplier for illegal drugs in the United States.
Therefore, Mexico should be the most important topic on the US foreign policy agenda and an important one on the transatlantic agenda. However, if we take the results of a recent survey in foreign policy, Mexico (and all of Latin America) is not very high on the minds of the foreign policy elite. Why?
My hypothesis is simple: the policy communities that care about the Euro-US transatlantic corridor and the Latin American Studies communities do not have shared cultures.
If that is true, what can we do?
Visualizing Transformation
The story of the following clip is much more interesting than the clip itself. It talks about the possibilities of our technologies and the sentiment of our times.
Did You Know? originally started out as a PowerPoint presentation for a faculty meeting in August 2006 at Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, United States. The presentation “went viral” on the Web and, as of June 2007, had been seen by at least 5 million online viewers (not including the countless others who saw it at conferences, workshops, training institutes, etc.).
[thanks to Roberto Rojo for the link]
Private Profit from Public Value?
Following a very old argument we made in 2001 (published in the ACM Journal Database for Applied Information Sciences in 2003), the challenge will be for community builders to act as political entrepreneurs telling compelling stories about their communities to persuade members to join, stay, and create public value (community value). The question, if private (meta-)profit can be skimmed of such a public value creating entity depends on the specific environment of the community and cannot be answered once and for all.
One ring to rule them all
with facebook opening its platform to outside developers (facebook apps) in May, speculation of who will rule the social software universe has again grown. We seem to expect a monopoly, duopoly, or oligopoly like in the operating system business, search, or messaging.
But if you look at the long-term trend (open access trumps walled gardens on the internet) and at all the tools available in the open source community, it seems that this is not where the action will be. In our analog/real/first worlds there are thousands of platforms (parties, cafes, libraries, schools, clubs, secret societies, etc.) and millions of communities that thrive. Maybe, what we need is more community entrepreneurs.
Some platform-projects you might want to look at:
For 3-D multiverses: Uni-Verse, Lib-Secondlife, Croquet.
Content-Management-Systems: Typo-3, Joomla. (thanks to Niki Helten)
Course-Management or E-Learning: Moodle.
peer producing change
If you never had the time, this is a good weekend to read Benkler’s Wealth of Networks. You could start with Chapter 3. Peer production, as a mode of production will transform our “economies” as the market system did in the 19th Century (following Polyani, The Great Transformation, Rinehart & Company, Inc, 1944). Read Chapter 4.
Permutations of the Privacy Debate
The privacy-in-the-Internet-Age debate has certain spiritual overtones that make it a more uncomfortable topic than it could be. I was confronted with it by Tobias yesterday at Georg Zoche’s famous Arrabiata-International-Night and just finished reading Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger‘s Useful Void – The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing, so I feel I need to write to understand.
It seems that in the privacy debate we often do not distinguish between different strands of thinking and therefore do not allow for all possible permutations in our positions. So let me propose a first framework to disentangle the debate.
- the public-private debate addresses the question what importance we ascribe to the distinction between our public and private selfs. The distinction has been foregrounded by feminist theory as modern artefact, necessary if we assume that society is based on a contract between originally independent individuals. It constructs two different domains of life governed by different rules, biased against certain groups. It is a bourgeois concept insofar that it is a defensive right against the intrusion of the state and constitutive for communicative action in modern democratic thinking. With the transformation in how we imagine collective action (from contracts to networks, from constitutive to outcome-based legitimation, from function to process, government to governance) the public-private distinction, in theory, should be losing importance as a guiding principle. These ideas show up very early in the history of the Internet, think of JenniCam and has been mainstreamed with all types of myspaces and facebooks. However, many of us still feel very strongly about the distinction and feel by giving it up, we look into the abyss of absolute vulnerability.
- the data retention debate focuses on the question how much of our lives should be registered and for how long. Viktor makes the argument that “we should revive our society’s capacity to forget” by tagging data with expiration dates. I very much enjoyed Viktor’s article, because he focused only on one aspect of the debate (data retention) and therefore is able to offer actionable policy advice. However, his argument relies on the idea that because the human brain retains its sanity by forgetting and because societies in the past did not have the capacity to retain all data, we should make use of our technological capacity to forget. I think both can be challenged, (a) is the analogy between the function of the brain and how we deal with collective memory valid? – This leads to questions of Philosophy in Flesh, and (b) Should we be so luddite/conservative and institutionalize forgetting, just because we very not able to remember in the past (and it worked well for us)?
- The aesthetics of the naked self debate. Clearly, we feel uncomfortable or even violated when data about ourselves that does not put us in the best of lights is revealed. However, this might be not because of the over-stepping of the public-private divide, but because we are unhappy with the aesthetics of the projection. Think of Pamela and Tommy Lee (available at Amazon).
- The decontextualization debate. Analog life is contextual, while digital data can be re-mixed. This leads to drunken pirates losing their diplomas and Las Vegas judges to be fired for breaking off their feet in the prosecutor’s ass. We are still grappling with developing (legal) frameworks that allow us to contextualize the digital.
By untangling these strands in the privacy debate, we can differentiate our positions on the issue. One way is to then deal with them one-by-one, as suggested by Viktor, or to just allow more complexity into the debate. I, for example, am not concerned about the public-private distinction, but do think there are important issues in the data retention debate, and I believe that we need to become more sophisticated in how we deal with the aesthetics-of-our-naked-selfs issue and the decontextualization issue. Not sure this adds value to the discussion, but here it is.
