Fundamentalism and oil markets

openDemocracy

We're implementing a sea change in our commenting policy here at openDemocracy. For a long time, we've allowed anybody to comment on our articles, and while this has brought a very high level of debate to the site on some issues, it has failed to really provide conversation between you, our readers, and the authors and editorial staff who comprise openDemocracy as a publisher.

We'd love to change that, and we hope that our new commenting system is going to achieve that goal. We'll be moving all comments posted on articles over to be completely moderated, initially by our editorial team here in the office, as well as some authors, but increasingly by the community itself.

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This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

openDemocracy

Please join the USC Institute for Network Culture for a discussion in a series on philanthropy and virtual worlds supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  
The event, "MacArthur and Virtual Worlds: Credibility and Reputation in the New News," will be held on the USC Annenberg Island [http://tinysl.com/Sf08849] at 10:00a.m. PST on Friday, February 29, 2008.   Read the rest of this post...

openDemocracy

Does climate change lead to war? UN Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon thinks so. Darfur "began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," he claimed back in June.

The suggestion is controversial. Idean Salehyan is an especially fierce critic. Writing in Foreign Policy, he accused Moon of ‘perverse logic'. The Sec Gen's irresponsible rhetoric merely allowed "oppressive, corrupt governments" to escape blame for their actions, Salehvan claimed.

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openDemocracy

Brad Setser at RGE Monitor has a very worrying picture:

It shows that long term lending to the US has dried up since August.

The consequences seem to me to be quite stark. Either

• the US starts to save much more, or
• the US offers much higher interest rates to foreign lenders

The first case means US, then world recession; the second case means financial market panic and recession. Anyone see any cheer in this?

 

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openDemocracy

This is cross-posted from Beena Sarwar's Yahoo Group. 

At around 5 pm all the TV news channels were taken off the air. This meant 'emergency declared' - soon confirmed. We were at the close of a meeting in Karachi to discuss the Citizens Charter, and sent out a press release (below) incorporating the info we had - Judges Colony in Islamabad sealed; ALL TV news channels taken off air; judges asked to take a new oath.

Since then, these updates have come in: Judges were asked to take a new oath (eight had refused) under a PCO (provisional constitional order); Supreme Court bench headed by the CJ set aside the PCO; Army entered Supreme Court where Bar was in session & 'escorted' the CJ out; CJ has been terminated. Aitzaz Ahsan arrested. Constitution suspended. Mush is supposed to address the nation 'some time this evening' according to PTV, the only news channel now working. According to another report 18 out of 28 Sindh High Court judge have been 'sacked'.

Message from Farooq Sulehria of the Labour Party Pakistan: "Though the regime is likely to use Taliban-occupation of certain districts as a pretext it is most likely that emergency is imposed to pre-empt a court ruling against Mushraaf's re-election. Emergency means that all basic democratic rights will be suspended while courts would have their powers curtailed. Pakistan has been in grip of political crisis and regime was facing growing mass resentment. This emergency is a desperate attempt to cling to power."

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openDemocracy

Maryam Omidi

While looking for articles yesterday morning to post on opennews (the side bar on the front page), I came across an article about the proposed US-Mexico border. As well as restricting the flow of illegal migration from the south, the rather ill-thought out and intrusive route of the wall will also dissect natural habitats, a university campus, a golf course and a national historic site.

Does this mean that students with lectures on the other side of the wall will have to show their passports? Or golfers whose balls have strayed into Mexican lands?

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openDemocracy

The philosophy panelists - Tom Chance, Dave Berry and Benjamin Mako Hill - brought to the open some of the rumblings set off by Lessig's keynote definition of what iC and CC are for.

Dave Berry set up the opposition of the dwelling that the Free Software movement has created against the database that Creative Commons has created. Can iC/CC aspire to be a movement like Free Software, with its passionate sense of belonging and its spectacular impact on the world? Or is it - at the opposite extreme as characterised by David Berry - a way of supplying free labour to Web 2.0 capitalism?

There were as many desires to express opinion as people in the room, so the debate continues on the iCommons site node.

This morphed during the day into the organisational question: iCommons movememnt or cadre organisation? Does iCommons have Stallman envy?

Yes and no. Larry Lessig responded in a realistic tone at the philosophy session: cultural production is not like software production, because it does not have a single purpose. Free Software has a purpose and unity that is created by compilers that run cross-processors.

Where is the dwelling of ``free culture''? It is in each specific act of cultural production: from every local band to the writers' groups to the biennale or Covent Garden. Is there any reason to unite the Free Culture parts of production under one purpose - to make Free Culture itserlf a cultural product, not an object of study?

That is what iCommons wants to do. I started these posts with the question: ``What is iSummit for''? It is here to support Free Culture, but also to unite Free Culture by giving it an identity. This purpose is being physically realised in its ambitious new web site, which aims to be a sort of cross between Sourceforge and Slashdot. It aims to bring under one domain representations of free culture production, while also distributing the goods of community - like visibility in the Free Culture world - according to a karmic currency.

We look forward, at openDemocracy, to being an active part of this.

 

tony curzon price 2007-06-16

openDemocracy

by Tony Curzon price at the iCommons summit 2007

You know the argument -- in the post-copyright world, musicians will find other revenue sources, like live performance. Well, if the same will apply to academics, you can be sure that Jonathan Zittrain will find his place in that economy. Try to get to see Jonathan live: as a scholar/showman cross between Seinfeld and Jeremiah, he creates a great event.

In his keynote on Friday, he recounted the epic of the witches that have been slain on the digital road to Oz. Closed systems, which grow only through central control, are out - success requires decentralisation.

Or does it? JZ flashed up Steve Jobs' comments on the iPhone: we don't want it to be a computer, with all the vulnerabilities that implies, says Jobs. The whole system should be under tight central control, else how can we bring you the services that you want: music, banking, payments, communications without eavesdropping -- or at least only ``trusted'' eavesdroppers.

The closed system is returning under the weight of malware. The attacks are destroying trust. We are fast depleting our innocence, and the world after the fall will be hard. SMTP will go like Usenet went.

The solutions? A moderation of the unbridled individuality of our behaviour. The iCommons has ``i'' and ``commons''. Making sure that we do become a herd that filters, shares and supplies micro-effort to the commong good. If we can do it for SETI, we can do it against malware ...the details are in Jonathan's the forthcoming book.

 

openDemocracy

by Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007

What is CC/iCommons? Lessig started answering the question during the keynote. It is:

And then he started telling us what it is not: ``It is not me, it is you!'' Before we knew it, we were listening to a near-farewell speech. For the next ten years, Larry wants to devote himself to the corruption of politics and public life by big money. Climate change ``knowledge'' has been on sale to the oil companies, for example, and the future of the world is being determined by $50,000 checks paid for friendly research.

As Becky Hogge suggested in an emotional question session, Larry is moving from fighting for the infrastructure of the commons to being an activist within the commons. We often think of Creative Commons as being about music, remix, mash-up and art. But one of the most important--I would say the most important--tasks of society is to ensure that there is a realm for the production of creduble knowledge and opinion. Larry is moving into that realm, it seems, and if he can bring to us his energy, creativity and intellect to the cause of creating Coalitions of Credibility (CC 2.0?), then I'm more optimistic for the public realm than I was before his speech.

openDemocracy

 

Does CC destroy free culture? Business models panel presentation.

I have a panel on business models this afternoon, and this is the presentation for it.

A simple argument:

- you need communities to make free culture, bothfor content and business ... both sense and cents

- but creative commons copying is a diffusing force, taking people away from the community

- solutions? technical , legal

openDemocracy

by Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007 in Croatia

``What is the purpose of the iSummit?'', I asked as a disparate band of commoners jumped into a taxi to the centre of town. The question seems obvious: fortunate scholars have been flown in from around the world to an astoundingly beautiful Mediterranean medieval fortified town; the conference is professional, the drinks good and plentiful, the publications beautifully produced. This conference has been well funded. So to what end? ``When Heather [Heather Ford is the Executive Director of iCommons, the organiser of the iSummit] filled in the parts of the grant applications that asked for `measurable impacts', what do you think she wrote?''

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openDemocracy

by Tony Curzon Price at the iCommons summit 2007 in Croatia

I was at iCommons Rio in June 2006. The habitual morning's bodysurfing on Copa Cabana was even more memorable than watching Brazil watching Brazil in the football world cup. But really memorable was the sense of a global movement coalescing around freedom of content, opened by Gilberto Gil humming his Bajia ode to freedom, and closed by Heather Ford telling us of the plans for the year ahead.

So what has happened in the IP world during that year? I sent out a broad invitation for 200 words on the significant events and here they are. Send me your own, and I will add them.

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openDemocracy

Technology, power, credibility

Eric Bettelheim, right-libertarian environmentalist, market mystic, basher of big government, protested in his defense of green growth against the jeremiads of journalists for whom pessimism has become a stock in trade. At The Week's excellent debate last night on ‘Growth can be green: the carbon market will allow us to save the planet without sacrificing economic growth,’ he flashed his Blackberry at us and proudly broke the news that the US had agreed to 50% cuts in emissions by 2050. "That might dampen some of the Bush baiting", he beamed.

Until, 10 minutes later, one of those pesky journalists pulled out another blackberry and told the assembly: "Bettelheim's report is inaccurate. Bush has not agreed to a 50% cut ... and his data is inaccurate in all these other ways ..."

Hoist by another blackberry: Bettelheim's credibility vanished almost instantly. He started by railing against the pessimistic reporters and was caught red-handed over-spinning the good news. And without the technology to allow us to check these things in real time, he would have got away with it - in the old days, no one the next morning would have remembered to correct the impression he had made the night before. Technology changes power. Read the rest of this post...

openDemocracy

by Ron Deibert, Director, The Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto

 

Just as evidence of threats to the global natural environment can be found in seemingly unrelated local events – deforestation here, a loss of wetlands there – so too can threats to the global communications environment. In Belarus, for example, access to opposition websites was disrupted during 2005 presidential elections, and then restored immediately afterwards. In Cambodia, the government shut down the use of text messaging over cellular networks two weeks prior to national elections. In Pakistan, inept attempts to block access to blogs containing imagery satirizing the Prophet Muhammed resulted in the collateral filtering of an entire blogging service, including those in support of the ban. Thailand blocked access to YouTube in objection to a few videos posted on the site satirical of the Thai king.

These and hundreds of other examples from the OpenNet Initiative’s latest research are but a few pieces of evidence of what has become an alarming trend: motivated by short-term security and cultural concerns, dozens of governments are carving up and corralling the once seamless Internet environment.

Like any other commons, the global communications environment is a finite public good whose maintenance as a valuable resource depends on sustained contributions of individuals worldwide. And yet citizens are having their legitimate contributions stifled by fickle governments who are threatened by freedom of speech and access to information.

Fortunately, there are many ways to begin to rescue the global communications environment. We need to encourage the research and development of tools (like the censorship-evading software psiphon) that support the Internet’s open architecture. We need to put pressure on governments that censor and the companies who assist them, promoting laws from the domestic to the international spheres that restrain their shortsighted motives. And we need to raise global awareness that if we, citizens of the earth, are ever to solve our many shared problems successfully, we need an unfettered planetary communications environment with which to do so.

Ron Deibert is speaking on Wednesday 6 June at “Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing: The Struggle for Free Expression in Cyberspace”, an Amnesty International event sponsored by the Observer. The event examines the future of free speech online - governments’ attempts to restrict expression and information on the Internet and how web users are harnessing the power of the internet to resist them. It is webcasted live here.

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