GAVNet Collaborative Curation

The internet’s low-cost transmission can just as easily create information empires and robber barons as it can digital democracy and information equality. The growing value of being able to mine and manipulate huge data-sets, to generate predictions about consumers’ behaviour and desires, creates a self-reinforcing spiral of network effects. Data begets more data, locked down behind each company’s walls where their proprietary algorithms can exploit it for profit.

Today, the equivalent gesture might be to turn away from private monopolies to fund innovation and creativity. What matters is who owns information, not just the infrastructure by which it is distributed. Digital technology must be combined with concrete actions that protect openness across the spectrum, from maps to medicines, from software to schools. Better that we do it through public institutions, instead of relying on mavericks and martyrs.

More than almost any library, Facebook may be the single greatest home for historical testimony in the history of humankind. One can only hope that, with this step, the technology company is realizing the weight of its awesome responsibility.

The failure of traditional politics reflects the failure of our political-economic system and our traditional strategies. The old ways simply no longer work. Systemic crisis means that systemic change is ultimately necessary – no matter how difficult it may be. Beginning with community and building up, from diverse directions and working together in a new politics and a practical strategy of system-wide change ultimately offers the only serious response to a crisis of system-wide dimensions.

It's a logical move for Snapchat to encourage its users to vote. The app reaches 41% of all 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. daily, a Nielsen study reported, according to the Wall Street Journal. Another survey conducted for Variety by Defy Media revealed that 30% of Snapchat users used the app to get news for the 2016 presidential campaign.  Millennials — people between the ages of 18 through 35 — make up approximately 31% of the overall electorate, NPR reported. It is also the group that has had the lowest voter turnout out of any other age group — just 46% voted in the 2012 presidential election. 

How to shift from absolute to differential value

communicating differential value

Why do your customers buy from you?

Just as the Industrial Revolution spurred the creation of powerful and destructive machines like airplanes and tanks that diminished the role of individual soldiers, artificial intelligence technology is enabling the Pentagon to reorder the places of man and machine on the battlefield the same way it is transforming ordinary life with computers that can see, hear and speak and cars that can drive themselves.

In this, the year of the leak, the hackers are contributing to a phenomenon — raw transparency — that should make democracy stronger.

In this, the year of the leak, the hackers are contributing to a phenomenon — raw transparency — that should make democracy stronger.

Almost unnoticed outside defense circles, the Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop what it calls autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with the kind of weaponry that until now has existed only in Hollywood movies and science fiction, raising alarm among scientists and activists concerned by the implications of a robot arms race.