#netocracy

[protoslacker]

Songs are funny things

I'm not very dumb, but not very smart either. And I'm old and I work. So there's whole bunches of stuff that's important that I'm pretty ignorant about. I am glad to be curious. As ignorant as I am, I often fall into rabbit holes.

I was thinking about songs. I want people to sing songs. There's a quote by Pete Seeger about songs which I like very much:

“Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.”

I was mulling over the trouble with people singing other people's songs. And thought of a lecture that Lawrence Lessig gave a long time ago. Searching for it the very first google result was a link to Leonard Lin's blog random($foo). Lin had put the lecture on the Internet and it's kind of cool to see how it was done back then. I headed over to YouTube to watch Lessig's talk at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference in July of 2002.

The talk is still worthwhile. At the time some of my creative friends thought Lessig was a sort of villain, so his talks got talked about.

At Tumblr someone I am very pleased to have encountered is Dr. Damien P. Williams. Something about meeting him at first on here is knowing what a kind and good person he is prior to discovering his deep erudition about the social implications of technology. These days I follow him on Mastodon where he pointed to an episode of NPR'S Code Switch with Safiya Noble dealing with "the complex questions that arise when algorithms and AI intersect with race."

It's a wonderful interview which really does touch on complexities, but the part that really made an impression was her background in advertising before returning to graduate school and earning her Ph.D. It put the economics of enclosure front and center in discussing AI.

I'm describing my fall down a rabbit hole and I think the next thing I engaged with was a post by Andy Baio at WAXY, Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning. Songs are funny things.

After that I landed on a review of a new book by Yanis Varoufakis by Christopher Pollard at The Conversation, Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it. The book is entitled Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism and will be available in print in the US in February. I listened to several interviews with Varoufakis and searched for literature on Neo-feudalism. It's certainly an idea I want to learn more about.

Back in the early oughts there was a book, Netocracy : the new power elite and life after capitalism by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist. For a little while the ideas were discussed quite a lot online. Remembering those conversations I did not anticipate how incredibly concentrated the autocracy would become, i.e., how few feudal lords there would be. And I paid too little attention to Chinese technology. But Bard coined a term for a new underclass called the "consumtariat" which seems quite handy and has stuck with me over the years.

It's going to take me a long while to wrap my head around neo-feudalism. But I suspect it will be time well spent.

Wendy Grossman at net.wars has a recent post, The end of ownership. The provocation for the post is a garage door opener which among other evils forces an ad on you before you can open the garage door. Grossman points to Cory Doctorow, The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot. I'd laugh, but it telling how fast technology and the tech-lords are enclosing us.

Who can sing songs and whose songs can we sing are urgent questions.

[renegade-hierophant]

[digital-nugget]

Grimmerspace - Netocracy // Leon Tukker

[hydralisk98]

Angora-punk

Inspirations (V.1)= 

Third Generation Computing, (1960-1977), Trans-humanism, Cognitive Liberty, Morphological Freedom, DIY / Maker culture vs Nano Manufacturing Electricity Corporations, Socialism, Rogue Servitors, Linguistics, Nazi Victory TL, Simulated reality, consciousness, societal issues, philosophy (Western and Chinese), Robots, Droids and Synthetics, Genetic Engineering, Infomorphs, Exocortex, Shapeshifting, Retrocognition, Teleportation, Astronomical Far Future aka 0x10c, Cyberspace, Arcology, Biohacking, Hacking, Modding, Reincarnation, Adult Beforelife, Angels, UNIX, God = the Multiverse itself, Heat Death, The Last Question from Isaac Asimov, Penance, Ecology, Peer to Peer, Lisp programming, The Alchemist from Paulo Coelho, Limited Post-Scarcity system, Eternal Curiosity, Honesty, Respect, Technocratic Obligarchy, Enlightened Despotism, Liquid Democracy, Social Democracy, Electocracy, Timocracy, Technocracy, Coprorate Republic, Noocracy, Trotskyism, Netocracy, Nomocracy, Absolute Monarchy, Parlimentary/Constitutional Monarchy, Republic, Socialist State, Parliamentary republic, Presidential system, partially the  NSDAP and the CPSU, Memchevik, Nano manufacturing, Mixed reality, Corporate mass surveillance, Nanosocialism, FTL, STL, Planetary colonization, Parallel TLs, Alien lifeforms, Psychics, Vertical farming, Claytronics, Programmable Matter, Synthetic Biology, Quantum dot, Ambient intelligence, Blockchain, Civic tech, Cryptocurrency, Internet of things, Nanoradio, Personalized medecine, Whole genome sequencing, Small satellite, Modular robot, Infosphere, Powered Armor, WMD, Biological weapons, Nanoswarm, predestinated time travel, grey goo...

Inspirations (V.2)= 

Third Generation Computing, (1960-1983), Trans-humanism, Cognitive Liberty, Morphological Freedom, Maker culture vs Nano Manufacturing & Electricity Corporations, Nano Socialism, Rogue Servitors, Societal Issues and Philosophies, Linguistics, Robots, Droids, Synthetics, Synthetical Biologies, Exocortex, Consciousness, Shapeshifting, Retrocognition, Psychics, Teleportation, Dimension Travel and Predestinated Time Travel, Biohacking, Hacking, Angels, UNIX, God = Multiverse itself, LISP, P2P, Penance, Heat Death, The Alchemist, Ecosystems, Decay, Liquid Democracy, Enlightened Despotism, Timocracy, Timocracy / Aristocracy, Absolute Monarchy, Socialist Commune, German National Socialism (Nazi ideology), Vertical farming, Claytronics, 3D printing, IoT, Blockchain, Open Source, Ambient Intelligence, Small Satellites, Biological weapons, Personalized Medecine, Genetical Engineering, Time Travel (Predestinated or Dimensional), Mixed Reality, Mass Surveillance, Technophobia, Alternate History, Cryptography, Reactive Adaptation...

(EDITING SOON)

[mkmsmartestcitieshumantitties]

netocracy refers to a perceived global upper-class that bases its power on a technological advantage and networking skills,

[internationaltechnosociology]

Chapters: Media literacy in the digital age Taste and aesthetics evolution review Understanding disruption Information intelligence update The Individual: a sales trick 3D Politics Netocracy Digital dark age Imagination age Transhumanism & Post-humanism Technological singularity / Accelerationism Mythology, Religion, Media and Social Media Vitality VS Identity Intimate technology, wearables and the cloud Glass-Vision, Virtual & Augmented realities = internet of experience Digital inventology Connections and the symptoms of disconnection

[robertmorrism]

Five Eyes does not "protect" New Zealanders - it`s not designed to protect, it`s designed to spy and it damages our global reputation. It is the equivalent of a lawless cowboy, roaming the streets with the latest weaponry, shooting at will.

Five Eyes shares the information of New Zealanders freely with the NSA and other intelligence agencies of the group, without the issuance of a warrant, or the permission of New Zealanders. 

Not so in Brazil.

The Marco Civil is a document to protect the privacy of Brazilians.   New Zealand must implement such a law.

In the latest interviews with the Prime Minister of New Zealand there is no mention of privacy or human rights law despite recommendations from the NZ Law Society, who say the GCSB law is "flawed".

Two things must happen to bring New Zealand up to speed.

Firstly, New Zealand must implement a law that protects the privacy of New Zealanders. This is fundamental for any democracy.

International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance

.

Specifically, this requires that, if a State seeks access to or use of protected information obtained through communications surveillance in the context of a criminal investigation, it must establish to the competent, independent, and impartial judicial authority that:

  - there is a high degree of probability that a serious crime has been or will be committed;

- evidence of such a crime would be obtained by accessing the protected information sought;

- other available less invasive investigative techniques have been exhausted;

- information accessed will be confined to that reasonably relevant to the crime alleged and any excess information collected will be promptly destroyed or returned; and

information is accessed only by the specified authority and used for the purpose for which authorization was given.

  If the State seeks access to protected information through communication surveillance for a purpose that will not place a person at risk of criminal prosecution, investigation, discrimination or infringement of human rights, the State must establish to an independent, impartial, and competent authority:

Transparency: States should be transparent about the use and scope of communications surveillance techniques and powers. They should publish, at a minimum, aggregate information on the number of requests approved and rejected, a dis-aggregation of the requests by service provider and by investigation type and purpose. States should provide individuals with sufficient information to enable them to fully comprehend the scope, nature and application of the laws permitting communications surveillance. States should enable service providers to publish the procedures they apply when dealing with State communications surveillance, adhere to those procedures, and publish records of State communications surveillance.

And secondly, New Zealand must exit the Five Eyes club.

The problem the New Zealand government faces is this. By implementing a law that respects your international human right to privacy and the recommendations of Netmundial; New Zealand cannot be a member of the Five Eyes spy club.

Five Eyes does not respect the human rights of New Zealanders. It is anti human rights. A spy ring, and New Zealanders are being shielded from this reality.

There has been no mention of Netmundial in New Zealand. No mention of international human rights law by the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Obviously, because he knows that Five Eyes is against everything that protects New Zealanders human right to privacy.

The Zealand mainstream media must discuss these matters with the Prime Minister before the election. And make Kiwi`s aware of the failures of the Five Eyes agreement, and the breaches according to the Netmundial document and international human rights.

If they don`t, they`re feeding into the premise that Five Eyes is a mechanism to protect Kiwi privacy, when the reality is quite the opposite. The government is lying to New Zealand, supported by weak investigative journalism, and the illusion that New Zealand is concerned about the privacy of Kiwis continues to propagate.

It needs to stop, and now the press should tackle the issue of internet privacy law, Netmundial and international human rights - that`s what Kiwi`s need to hear. 

Lastly, the politicians and mainstream media in New Zealand have said continuously that the matter of The Moment of Truth has stopped the debate of more important issues.

Again, that is a falsehood. Consider this statement from the Guardian -

"The diplomatic costs of friendly fire spying could be as great in Latin America as in Europe. For pure outrage, nothing has come close to Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, on discovering her phone calls and texts, and those of her aides, had been intercepted by the NSA.

She cancelled a state visit to Washington scheduled for October and instead went to the UN general assembly in New York the month before to denounce American intelligence as a violation of Brazilian state sovereignty and international law. "Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information – often of high economic and even strategic value – was at the centre of espionage activity," she told the UN. "Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the permanent mission to the UN and the office of the president of the republic itself, had their communications intercepted.

Tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront of the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations. A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation. The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating fundamental human rights of citizens of another country."

Now, tell me, how much money and respect this blatant action by the NSA cost the Five Eyes club of countries? And how did it affect the relationship between Brazil and New Zealand?

The latest comments from John Key regarding the ongoing investigations by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Cheryl Gwyn.

"She is in a position to see under the covers, what's really taking place, and give an objective view to New Zealanders."

But she could not see what activities, if any, the NSA might be carrying out in New Zealand.

"We've always said, in the end, there are other agencies around the world either legally as a result of their own laws or illegally will be out there potentially collecting information on New Zealanders," Key said.

"But the big control check from New Zealand's point of view is we absolutely do not circumnavigate the law and use our departments to do that.

"The United States of America has some interesting issues it's having to deal with, and tangentially there's always a risk that a New Zealander is involved in that, whether as a foreign fighter or whatever it might be.

"But New Zealand is not the primary interest of the United States."

And he is correct.

But, again, the press report does not address the problem of privacy law or international human rights. Nor does Key tackle this.

And Cheryl Gwyn is NOT in a position to see "under the covers".

Key knows the NSA can access New Zealanders private information, illegally via Five Eyes and XKeyscore at will - and he doesn`t consider this an issue or a problem. Five Eyes provides the illegal access to our metadata, and Key has signed off on this without our permission.

Personally, the GCSB can share whatever intelligence information they have with Five Eyes. I have no problem with that. But, I did not give the government of New Zealand permission to access my private information or metadata and share it - did you? And when the NSA have access to this information, without permission, completely undetectable by an independent investigator, that is unlawful.

There is nothing more critical than NetMundial and our right to privacy, transparency and freedom of expression.

"We cannot uphold the law by breaking the law," writes @edri's Joe McNamee: http://t.co/ebHqxw2K08 #privacyisaright

— EFF (@EFF)

September 17, 2014

[serenityforge]

The Hidden Power of the Game Reviewer

The indie game boom has changed the face of the industry. Especially in an economic sense.

You see, there are now countless games; far more than is feasible for any one person to be aware of. There are hundreds of award-worthy games a year, but only a few of them rise to the top. These games do not have inherent value, but POTENTIAL value. Before Jim Sterling picked up Deadly Premonition, it was doomed to fail. Afterwards, it pushed the studio to release a Director's Cut.

The point is, even though these reviewers don't get paid a lot, their work enriches the game industry with value. And this effect will only grow.

There's a rumor that Steam is going to do away with Greenlight. And in its place, it will allow all games to be published on Steam, with games to be showcased on user "stores", where people recommend the games they want to promote. The most popular will be celebrities like Yahtzee and PewDiePie. And as the front end of the Steam store, they'll be deciding what succeeds and fails in one of the fastest-growing industries.

As Alexander Bard puts it, they'll be Netocrats, the most important link in their socio-economic network. They transform quality attention into monetary value. Perhaps not for themselves, but social standing can be turned into liquid capital more efficiently than vice-versa.

Their jobs, to vocalize opinions and create simple media, are remarkably low-effort for the amount of value they'll be creating, and will therefore be highly-coveted jobs. If Steam does decide to allow self-publishing, prepare for the sector to explode.

[blondebeastie]

Let the Mountain come to me! (Vacuum) another project of Swedish musician, producer and sociologist Alexander Bard (an author of the very interesting book "Netocracy", Damn I think I need a net library I think, another book to recommend to everyone - "Digging deeper and wider than any previous effort into what the information revolution truly means, Netocracy is the must-read. Netocracy is the unsurpassable how and when of this whole revolution." Kjell A. Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale, authors of Funky Business The world will not live without logos, but neither will capitalism silently take over democracy. What comes next? Forget capitalism and the class struggle, we are witnessing the birth of a whole new world. The digital revolution is, in fact, changing things far more dramatically then the hype-mongers of tech Internet ever imagined - only not in the way that they and their investors hoped. The move from a society dominated by print and broadcast mass media to the age of interactivity is at least as dramatic as the move from feudalism to capitalism. After capitalism comes attentionalism. Those who can harness global networks of information and master new forms of communication will control business, finance and legislation, forming the new business and government elites. They will inherit the power; they are the Netocracy.Driven by the Internet and mobile communications, networks are turning into the major means of doing business, organising action, getting knowledge; the organising principle for the information age. Simply put, networks will make the world go round. So controlling the networks of this world will soon count for more than controlling the capital. Harness the right network and yuo can do anything, anywhere. Manuel Castells has described the Internet as the most extraordinary technological revolution in history. But he also suggests it is as underdeveloped socially as it is overdeveloped technologically.

http://www.thenetocrats.com/

And don`t forget to watch the song video :)

[erzakdeposu]

Alexander Bard - Jan Söderqvist: Netocracy

http://ow.ly/s6lEs

[protoslacker]

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?

[the-netocrat]

One example of a typical netocratic dilemma is the recurrent choice between exploitation and imploitation. Suppose two netocrats meet on a far-off island with picturesque ruins and beautiful beaches, but with no tourist industry at all. This is a typical netocratic destination, a perfect place for someone who practises tourism in the form of imploitative consumption. When the two netocrats are sitting on their sun-loungers, sipping cold drinks at sunset, they are faced with the question of whether they should keep the island a secret and only tell their closest friends of its existence, or build hotels and an airport and then market the island as a destination for all the tourists of the world: put simply, should they improve it and then sell it to the highest bidder. If they choose to keep the island secret, they will be following an imploitative strategy; if they choose to make a profit from their discovery, they will be following the opposite, exploitative strategy. The difference between netocrats and classical capitalists is that the netocrats have these two options. Knowledge of the island has such a high value to the netocrats, and profit such a relatively low one, that exclusivity could well weigh heavier than economic profit. For the capitalist there is no choice. For him the accumulation of capital is the central project in life, a project compared to which everything else is subordinate. But the netocrat does not share this view. Conscious of the fact that his new-found paradise would lose its unique aura if it was exploited, the netocrat can choose, thanks to his independence from and lack of interest in capital, to imploit the island instead: to keep it secret and reserve it for the pleasure of himself and his netocratic colleagues.

Bard, Alexander; Söderqvist, Jan (2012-02-24). The Futurica Trilogy (p. 97). Stockholm Text Publishing AB. Kindle Edition. 

[overodder]

Jan Söderqvist #netocracy #ebooks (Taken with instagram)

[jonasenander]

Nationalism

The nationalistic winds keep on blowing in the world. The old world fights back. We are many who has left it behind and embraced a world without borders and with information supreme.

France stops trains from Italy with immigrants, Right-wing populism breaks through in Finland, last Swedish election right-wings came into the government... etc. (I dont take responsibility for the links, they are only for anchoring in AFK). 

It seems to me that the people that are left behind are fighting some kind of war with the people that have left. And the tool of choice is to go back to nationalism and try to define old values and thus bringing back old days.

I hope that the world do not break down until the new political parties gain power. 

[protoslacker]

Another reason why we shouldn’t trust Google to provide us with credible, accurate and neutral information is that its main concern is advertising, not informing. That’s why we should be very worried. While public institutions such as universities, schools, libraries, archive and other memory spaces are loosing state funding (the book focuses on the USA but Europe isn’t a paradise either in that respect), private corporations and their black-boxed information-sorting tools are taking over and gaining greater control over information and thus over the representation of cultural groups or individuals.

Regine Debatty at We Make Money Not Art reviews Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble

[protoslacker]

It’s now clear that this shift in the use of behavioral data was an historic turning point. Behavioral data that were  once discarded or ignored were rediscovered as what I call behavioral surplus. Google’s dramatic success in “matching” ads to pages revealed the transformational value of this behavioral surplus as a means of generating revenue and ultimately turning investment into capital. Behavioral surplus was the game-changing zero-cost asset that could be diverted from service improvement toward a genuine market exchange. Key to this formula, however, is the fact that this new market exchange was not an exchange with users but rather with other companies who understood how to make money from bets on users’ future behavior. In this new context, users were no longer an end-in-themselves.  Instead they became a means to profits in  a new kind of marketplace in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products.  Users are the source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process.

Shoshana Zuboff in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The Secrets of Sureillance Captialism

GOOGLE AS A FORTUNE TELLER

Shoshana Zuboff