The Whitehouse CIO has released a strategy, entitled "Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People", providing federal agencies with a 12-month plan that focuses on
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Situating Occupy | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters - 0 views
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perhaps the greatest world historian alive today, immanuel wallerstein, has argued that since 1789 all major revolutions have really been world revolutions.
The revolution will be tweeted - science-in-society - 06 February 2012 - New Scientist - 0 views
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Economic meltdown, pro-democracy revolts, protest camps - it's kicking off everywhere. But was all this catalysed by new social media and technologies as many claimed? Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent who witnessed much of the unrest at first-hand, tells Liz Else that it's a lot subtler than that
The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality - Salon.com - 0 views
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What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process. Remember all that? Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight? So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this: how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?
Why Big Media Is Going Nuclear Against The DMCA | TechCrunch - 0 views
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When Congress updated copyright laws and passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation. In the decade since, companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter have emerged thanks to the Act, but in the process, they have disrupted the business models and revenue streams of traditional media companies (TMCs). Today, the TMCs are trying to fast-track a couple of bills in the House and Congress to reverse all of that. Through their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., media companies are trying to rewrite the DMCA through two new bills. The content industry's lobbyists have forged ahead without any input from the technology industry, the one in the Senate is called Protect IP and the one in the House is called E-Parasites. The E-Parasite law would kill the safe harbors of the DMCA and allow traditional media companies to attack emerging technology companies by cutting off their ability to transact and collect revenue, sort of what happened to Wikileaks, if you will. This would scare VCs from investing in such tech firms, which in turn would destroy job creation. The technology industry is understandably alarmed by its implications, which include automatic blacklists for any site issued a takedown notice by copyright holders that would extend to payment providers and even search engines. What is going on and how exactly did we get here?
We Stand With the Majority of Americans: Human Needs, Not Corporate Greed | October 2011 - 0 views
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A large majority of the American people consistently support the following agenda: Tax the rich and corporations End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages Get money out of politics
Things That Make Me Angry | Thinkahol's Blog - 0 views
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Wall Street Isn't Winning - It's Cheating The two-tiered justice system: an illustration 9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality The Quiet Coup "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" What OWS is about + data behind the movement Data privacy is now extinct in the U.S. "The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life." The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery? How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich: The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent
Video - Douglas Rushkoff on Why Jobs Are Obsolete - WSJ.com - 0 views
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All the fixation on creating jobs in America is outdated and misguided, argues media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff. He explains to WSJ's Dennis Berman his theory on new models that could actually increase productivity and make Americans more satisfied.
xkcd: Money - 0 views
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XKCD produces another fantastic infographic, this time about all the money in the economy. Ridiculously awesome.
"Militants": media propaganda - Salon.com - 0 views
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To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"
Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API @ API Evangelist - 0 views
Was Apple alles zensiert - n-tv.de - 0 views
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Welche Programme auf iPhone oder iPad laufen dürfen, bestimmt Apple. Wer sich nicht an die Regeln hält, fliegt aus dem App Store. Politische Satire und Sex sind tabu. Gewalt ist pfui und nutzlos sollte ein Programm gefälligst auch nicht sein. Das erinnert einen doch an irgendwas ...
The New York Times > National > Portraits of Grief > Mohammad Salman Hamdani: An All-Am... - 0 views
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More than anything else, Mohammad Salman Hamdani wanted people to see him for who he truly was, not for who he seemed to be.
Ethan Nichtern: Radical Buddhism and the Paradox of Acceptance - 0 views
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Practical transformation is what Buddhist practice is all about. To practice meditation consistently is to push back hard against the tidal wave of materialism that is quite literally killing the planet.
LRB · David Runciman · How messy it all is - 0 views
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Sometimes inequality is bad for almost everyone, and sometimes only for certain people; sometimes it is worst for the people at the bottom, and sometimes it is just as bad for the people at the top. Different societies are equal or unequal for different reasons, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice. More equality is a good thing and it's an idea that's worth defending. It would be nice if there were more politicians willing to stand up and defend it, however they saw fit.
Net neutrality is foremost free speech issue of our time - CNN.com - 0 views
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If we learned that the government was planning to limit our First Amendment rights, we'd be outraged. After all, our right to be heard is fundamental to our democracy. Well, our free speech rights are under assault -- not from the government but from corporations seeking to control the flow of information in America. If that scares you as much as it scares me, then you need to care about net neutrality. "Net neutrality" sounds arcane, but it's fundamental to free speech. The internet today is an open marketplace. If you have a product, you can sell it. If you have an opinion, you can blog about it. If you have an idea, you can share it with the world. And no matter who you are -- a corporation selling a new widget, a senator making a political argument or just a Minnesotan sharing a funny cat video -- you have equal access to that marketplace.
SMALL CHANGE Why the revolution will not be tweeted - 2 views
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The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns
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There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
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The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
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Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell
Vitalizing Democracy through Participation - 0 views
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Reinhard Mohn Prize 2011 Bertelsmann Stiftung This platform was launched to collect and discuss projects from all over the world that help to "Vitalize democracy through participation" - and to identify a winner for the Reinhard Mohn Prize 2011.
Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Rethinking Open Data: Lessons... - 0 views
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You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.
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Ongoing maintenance and distribution of the data hasn’t been budgeted for almost all the data sets we have today. This attitude has to change, and new projects give us the chance to get it right, but most existing datasets are unfunded for maintenance and release.
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there are at least five different types of Open Data groupie: low-polling governments who want to see a PR win from opening their data, transparency advocates who want a more efficient and honest government, citizen advocates who want services and information to make their lives better, open advocates who believe that governments act for the people therefore government data should be available for free to the people, and wonks who are hoping that releasing datasets of public toilets will deliver the same economic benefits to the country as did opening the TIGER geo/census dataset.
Crowd-sourcing is not empowering enough - 0 views
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It invites individuals to foist and endorse (or not) ideas with no pressure to consider the full public consequences of them, including whether they can be sustained across ideological or partisan lines, or how practical they are, or how insulting of public officers. There is the published intention to attract a full range of public perspectives, but instead it tends to attract enclaves of people with committed strategies (eg. embarrass public officials) or perspectives (eg. technology is the answer). While national initiatives attract noise, in more local applications of such ideation, participation is often too thin to be meaningful. This all comes down the question of representativeness. If a governing body is going to legitimately use these ideas, and be compelled to do so, then there has to be good evidence that the contributors do actually form a descriptive representation of the public being governed. I think if you have a technical problem that requires particular expertise, then such ideation processes can find the needle in the haystack. Those of us who subscribe to technical forums know how well that works. I think some people feel that public policy ideation works the same way, but it doesn't because in a contested political environment, what "should be done" is claimed on normative rather than technical grounds. Another metaphor for the ranking in ideation is consumer selection, which many in political science would model as rational choice, privileging private over public interests. Should that be the motor for the selection of public policy? I write all this knowing full well that I risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I just think we can do better. Some ideation processes should invite people randomly, to ensure full demographic spread on relevant dimensions (eg. age, education, political leaning). Let's have multi-stage processes, where contributors do more than just introduce and rank ideas--to their credit, thi
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I fear that ultimately crowd-sourcing is damaging the enterprise of dialogue and deliberation (D&D).
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