In one part of Ethiopia, communities are putting the world’s governments and many aid agencies to shame.

You can read the full blog post here

In fact the question is: Is online piracy and ubiquitous free content killing our culture? I believe we must always be open to divergent and different perspectives of the world. We must be prepared to see the world from anothers’ perspective. I do think this is at times a good question to ask.

Morozov writes: Levine’s call to arms – “it’s time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age”

But then one has to ask the question for example is Fox News culture? meaningful culture, worthwhile culture. Rupert Mordoch famously said he would make Sky News in the UK more like Fox if he had his way. Just have a read about the delightful Roger Ailes that runs Fox. The mainstream media that presents information as truth that plays a key and important role in shaping the debate about our world, has been found wanting. Is this system worth preserving?

But I persisted with the review – some good points raised. However,

In a chapter subtitled “How the internet could kill Mad Men”, Levine frets about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s, American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed Levine’s conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would be “How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men”.

And how many times have incumbents fought bitterly and viciously to stop others. The telegraph versus the telephone for example. Morozov goes on…

Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine lists among the greatest threats to cable television – seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly 6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books – in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less appealing.

None of this excites Levine, who complains that the internet has not encouraged innovation. “Like TV, the internet is only as good as what’s on,” he writes. Statements like this underscore the danger of setting internet policy based on the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

I arrived at the conclusion that Levine is representative of a certain form of market fundamentalism – and this fundamentalism is dangerous. Born out of not understanding, not wanting to understand. An arrogance about what is “culture” and who has the right to create it. He sees markets not as cultural but purely economic, he sees people only as consumers. Culture in his view, and people that he represents, see “culture” as a means to extract money from people. Simple. As the economist John Kay wrote,

“Capitalists are capitalism’s worst enemy, and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”

For me, and Morozov saves it for last, is that in “Levines opinion James Murdoch was a saviour of Journalism.” The same James Murdoch who may have perjured himself, who along with his father owned a newspaper that in its quest for monetary gain, hacked into the voice mails of dead children, to get “the edge” on their rivals in the tabloid newspaper wars. If that is what Levine thinks is culture, then God help us all.

True democracies need open public spaces, that are shared, where people can meet as equals, writes John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy. It is no surprise then that we see the square recently as the symbol of a free society Tahrir Square for example. Seumas Milne, writes

The strong likelihood that neither the Egyptian army nor anyone else is going to be able to halt this process where it is, nor prevent a far deeper democratic transformation and settling of accounts with the old regime. This is not some phoney western-backed “colour revolution”, after all, swapping one elite for another with a stage army made for TV. The evidence of the scale of popular self-organisation and collective commitment reflects a profound social process that is unlikely to be derailed before it has delivered much more radical change. That will have a global as well as a domestic impact, and not only because of the impetus it has given to opposition forces across the region. The greater the democratic cleansing of an economically parasitic regime dependent on foreign support, the more a country that has been the pivot of western power in the Middle East is likely to take an independent course.

Through the open squares, that were once upon a time, only symbols of people-power today are the medium by which the powerful begin to feel the pinch of the powerless. Yes, digital technologies played a role, speak-to-tweet, twitter, mobile communications, Facebook as tools for organisation. But its the people in the streets that are visceral, that force into consciousness the fact the people want back their public squares. In No Straight Lines; making sense of our non-linear world I argue, we are renegotiating the power relationships of how we want to live, work, govern, and that communication tools that are low cost and widespread can be used as tools for political change. In the age of networked communications, we are witness to something of a ‘Gestalt switch’ which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it’. This is a universal ideal not one linked to any particular region.

Further reading

• The Life and Death of Democracy in the networked society
• Democracy lock down – but where is that exactly?
• Wikileaks and the battle for middle earth begins
• When the shit hits the fan its time to innovate
• Musings on the common spirit of distrust
• A people will only be free when their control their own communications Mr Murdoch

From simple to complex to complicated

We know that, where we once thought our future to be certain, the only certainty we now face is uncertainty. The question is then how to deal with uncertainty?

Now is the time when we need a way of evaluating of what comes next, when we face a world having gone in a very short period of time from seemingly simple, to complicated to, complex, and, chaotic. Chaotic complexity is concussive, it disorientating effects surround us, resulting often in more fundamentalist worldview reflexes and perspectives that are dangerously corrosive And yet, this world seems to be if anything, accelerating. At this very moment, great debates are raging, the spanners are in the works defined by 911 (we now talk about asymmetrical warfare), the near collapse of the world banking system (and its asymmetrical impact on every single one of us), and the fever pitched exchanges going on all levels of society in every country on this planet over wikileaks and its asymmetrical deep impact. Bruce Sterling writes a great post in Underpaid Genius These are defining ideological battles exploding and imploding at the same time and they arrived in a single decade. Importantly, these dilemmas are highly interlinked and interdependent, consequently a one-size-fits-all command and control approach just wont do. Simply put, there are no longer simple problems, what we face are complex dilemmas.

We are in part renegotiating a whole plethora of power relationships and of course this happens in unexpected and sometimes unwanted ways.

Naughton makes 4 keys points… [1] The first confrontation between the old order and a non-linear world, [2] The lying of political elites to electorates, [3] This is a wake up call  [4] The entropic decline of our political systems. He also says this,

Like most people, I’ve only read a fraction of what’s been published by WikiLeaks, but one thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they comprehensively expose the way political elites in Western democracies have been lying to their electorates.

And,

What WikiLeaks is exposing is the way our democratic system has been hollowed out. Governments and Western political elites have been shown to be incompetent (New Labour and Bush Jnr in not regulating the financial sector; all governments in the area of climate change), corrupt (Fianna Fail in Ireland, Berlusconi in Italy; all governments in relation to the arms trade) or recklessy militaristic (Bush Jnr in Iraq) and yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted in a really effective way, their reaction is to try to silence the messenger — as Noam Chomsky pointed out.

Why is it a battle for middle earth, or indeed all earth? Because I believe that we as a humanity are beginning, as I argue in my my forthcoming book No Straight Lines: making sense of a non linear world, to renegotiate the power relationships of how we work, trade, live, govern, educate ourselves. We are at the toxic tail-end of our industrial society, the literacy that accompanies the web, the ability to engage in the world in a different way means we, as a society, begin to ask bigger questions about that society.

For example Douglas Rushkoff points out that,

But like literacy, the open source ethos and process are hard if not impossible to control once they have been unleashed. Once people are invited to participate in say, the coding of a software programe, the begin to question just how much of the rest of our world is open for discussion, formerly esoteric subjects such as Urban Design or Monetary Policy become much more central as the public comes to recognise the power of these planning spcialities to establish rules through which society actually comes into existence… we become more conscious consequently, and more aware or how our day-to-day decisions can be better aligned with larger issues.

This leads to the idea that a Gestalt Switch has been triggered, in No Straight Lines, I write,

I wonder whether we are once again after a period of time taking matters into our own hands. I ask this question as John Keane in The Life and Death of Democracy refers to Charles Malik[1], who was renowned as someone who profoundly believed in the principles of human rights. How do we, asked Malik gain the rights of humanity on a global scale? Indeed, Malik believed that if humanity felt that the various institutions of governance failed us we would take matters into our own hands – and we did. Yet in many ways, that was still confined to regions and countries. Is it possible this time around that through communications connectivity the scope changes perspective? “This new galaxy of media has no historical precedent,” says Keane. It is: “a new world system of overlapping and interlinked media devices that integrate texts, sounds and images and enable communication to take place through multiple user points, in chosen time, either real or delayed, within modularized and ultimately global networks that are affordable and accessible to many hundreds of millions of people scattered across the globe”[2].

I sense the possibility of history in the making. In today’s world the powerful are often “feeling the ‘pinch’ of the powerless”. Politics as a consequence has become viral, even visceral, which implies that traditional frameworks of governance have become somewhat outdated, and consequently ineffectual. Therefore Keane concludes, in the age of networked communications, combined with organisations that are constantly monitoring the motives and actions of various powerful parties, “combine into something of a Gestalt switch” which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it.

As Frantz Fanon once famously said, “A people will only be free when the control their own communications”. I am not for a free-for-all anarchist existence – but I do think we are forcing a conversation about trust, power and control; who has it, and how it is wielded now and in the future.

[1] Keane, p.733

[2] Keane, p.738

Film maker Martin Durkin explains the full extent of the financial mess we are in: an estimated £4.8 trillion of national debt and counting. It’s so big that even if every home in the UK was sold it wouldn’t raise enough cash to pay it off. Durkin argues that to put Britain back on track we need to radically rethink the role of the state, stop politicians spending money in our name and introduce, among other measures, flat taxes to make Britain’s economy boom again.

This polemical film presented by Martin Durkin, brings economic theory to life and makes it hit home. It includes interviews with academics, economic experts, entrepreneurs, no less than four ex-Chancellors of the Exchequer and the biggest stack of £50 notes you’ll never see.

What’s your opinion? Have your say below, or discuss on Twitter using #Trillion.

I suppose we do polemics differently to the US. As I did not feel we were in Michael Moore, Naomi Klein or even George Monbiot territory. I was left wondering what all this meant and why had we got into this position? Is it a very conservative / republican agenda wrapped up in something more appealing was a nagging hanging thought? But the argumentation was very coherent, and indeed credible.

The example of the work ethic of Hong Kong inspired by a British Civil Servant was, eye-brow raising. I felt myself asking where did it all go so wrong? As having read a little about the demise of our manufacturing and engineering sectors – it does beg the question. Simply put how did we inspire Hong Kong to become the economic power house it is, and fail to take the medicine ourselves. That said Milton Friedman, the arch villan in Naomi Klein’s view, described Hong Kong as one of the greatest experiments in laissez-faire capitalism. That, and when the state is bigger than the private sector how do we generate revenue and growth? Is taxation the way forward at all? How do you inspire entrepreneurs to give their creative best which ultimately should bring in more money for all. That said we don’t see the trickle down effect, or has the system per se become unworkable as was argued with the case of the NHS? I don’t have the answers, but it seems we have to go on a journey to collectively answer the question(s).

Watch: Britain’s trillion pound horror story

Porter writes,

There is almost no one in the business outside News International who disagreed with the director general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, when he said on US television that there was a case for looking at Rupert Murdoch’s media ownership systematically because of the “potential for abuse of power”.

At the heart of this is media ownership, and how that ownership is used as a source of power.

The corruption that stems from Murdoch’s power and his willingness to intimidate politicians has become so entrenched that we barely notice it. Instead of seeking to control him, we give him the easy pass to the rear entrance of Number 10 so the influence he exerts goes unobserved. Instead of being shunned, he is offered the podium in Lancaster House, from where he will no doubt lecture us on the self-serving conviction that unfettered markets result in free minds.

NewsCorp is very focused on commerce it seems a little more distracted about the quality and veracity of its journalism, or where it comes from, read phone hacking scandal. Its motivation to sell news and media as content, has nothing to do with the needs  of this country. Porter describes Murdoch as a marauding foreign power – an Ozzie who is now an American citizen. Though to be fair it was the bungling of the British media buffoons with British Satellite Broadcasting that gave Murdoch his entreé into British broadcast media – he then adopted the google maxim “speed before perfection” and then exploited his position.

The press, was once described as warhorses, prepared to stand up to and challenge, investigate and defend matters of importance, this has largely been given up to the grocers, those that have a very different perspective of media ownership and its role in our modern world.

Most government agencies are missing out on a core ingredient with their contests. Sunlight had a not-so-secret sauce in its contest strategy that ought to be shared

For us at Sunlight, the not-so-big secret was that it was never about the apps. While it worked out great that there were apps like Filibusted and Know-Thy-Congressman, the production of the apps were never our desired end results. A win for us wasn’t the awesomeness that is GovPulse.us, a great app built for Apps for America 2. It wasn’t even getting exposure to the technology community through the talks I got to give at places like Web2 Expo, and OSCon.

A win for our contest program was Jim Gilliam. Jim participated in our first apps contest with “Hello, Congress” that is now GuvLuv.org. Jim entered that contest, became an avid member of the Sunlight Labs Google Group got inspired, and built act.ly not out of any apps incentive, but because he was inspired. Jim’s now building a business around that work.

See— the purpose of our contests weren’t to generate apps, but to build community. It’s to create a sustainable community of support and connection for the people who are eager to help out. The contests were an incentive model to build a long-term community of developers.

Via Clay Johnson quoted from his blog and frequently tweeted @ #gov20

Enabling and empowering, not service deliverology with targets! It’s embedded sociability not social media. Its a bit like the Bill Bailey principle, Bill the comedian is asked how he comes up with his jokes – “I start with a laugh and work backwards, what do I need to do to create that amunt of laughter?” Exactamondo. This also got me thinking about the Dewey Winburne Awards – where people everyday people go the extra mile to help others via technology – I went to the awards and was deeply moved whilst I was in Austin Texas. If we expand on that, for me enabling is giving people the tools to do things they are passionate about. The idea that we have, and we have, professionalised all the services a community needs, but removes the community from, if they want to, engage, help, advise etc., as now all services are run by professional administrators – perhaps inevitable in complex mobile societies – but we have lost something along the way and we need to claim it back. When we remove people from creating everyday things we also remove context, when we remove context, we remove meaning, without meaning we are unable to engage. Its why so much modern politics leaves us cold and disinterested. But that said, as Richard Sennett wrote in his book The Craftsman, we want to re-engage with the spirit of the Enlightenment but on the terms that are relevant to our age. Thank you Dominic Campbell of FutureGov for giving me the heads up on this #gov20 event – fascinating

My interest in his work, is that communication technologies are political and can be wielded with great power – Politics as a consequence has become viral, even visceral, which implies that traditional frameworks of governance have become somewhat outdated, and ineffectual. Therefore Keane concludes, in the age of networked communications, combined with organisations that are constantly monitoring the motives and actions of various powerful parties, ‘combine into something of a Gestalt switch’ which makes us think differently about how we perceive power and who wields it’. And what does that mean for Britain? Here are a few thoughts.

Here he introduces us to The Life and Death of Democracy.

Like these Gov 2.0 models and other open government initiatives, CFA seeks to build a platform that demolishes the wall between governments and the people they serve. But a key difference with CFA is that Pahlka hopes to develop solutions that allow citizens to create their own data rather than build applications from government-generated data.

And does that make sense?

Pahlka says people should think of government as a platform for interactivity, where the citizens personally affected by the city’s problems can help create the solutions.

Via government technology

Rebooting Britain (here) and (here) and (here).

But you could say it is already happening