<nettime> A counter-G20 on Open Data, Open Governement and No More Bullying

["Rob van Kranenburg" <kranenbu@xs4all.nl>]

Hello all,

>From the bricolist, on specific request of Patrice:

A counter-G20 on Open Data, Open Governement and No More Bullying

When: November 3-4 2011
Where: Tunisia, venue tba
More information soon.

In Cannes, Governments will try to "close" the Net with intellectual
property protection enforcement. We'd like a real "G20 du Net" with people
that make the Internet and not only lawyers that try to close it. This
shadow G20 says we have had enough of those old sad stories of
competition, bullying, citizen bashing and killing. We believe a time has
come for collaboration of ordinary people, dancing in the streets and
saying hello to our neighbours and we want the simple and hackable devices
and infrastructure that go with that.

Tunisia can become an exemplary cybernetic country and hackers can help

- dismantling the net censorship infrastructures
- rebuilding a full decentralized infrastructure that could guarantee the
freedom of speech.
- leapfrog into wireless, NFC, Zigbee, open hardware business models and
Internet of Things

We want to discuss with the people on the ground and be led by them in
setting up hackerspaces throughout the Arab world.

Contact: Olivier Laurelli <olaurelli@bearstech.com>

Salut! Rob

ps It is becoming all the more obvious that it is the very idea of a state
as an organizational form that is prolonging all this violence. This idea
also does strange things to people, probably appealing to their potential
for being part of something 'bigger'. The very notion of scale as a factor
for success can now seen to be synomymous. Psychologists specialized in
the behaviour of larger groups of people try to explain the relative ease
with which one is able to exert influence over masses by assuming "a
causal force which bears on every member of an aggregate, and also for
each individual there is a large number of idiosyncratic causes
(Stinchcombe, 1968: 67 -68n) He continues: "Now let us suppose that the
idiosyncratic forces that we do not understand are four times as large as
the systematic forces that we do understand....As the size of the
population increases from 1 to 100, the influence of the unknown
individual idiosyncratic behavior decreases from four times as large as
the known part to four tenths as large as the known part. As we go to an
agggregate of a million, even if we understand only the systematic
one-fifth individual behavior as assumed in the table, the part we do not
understand of the aggregate behavior decreases to less than 1 percent
(0.004)."

This shows how top down power works and why scaling itself has become such
an important indicator in such a system of 'success'. Imagine you want to
start a project or 'do something' with your friends or neighbours, say 5
people. This means that you have to take into account before you do
anything - state a goal, negociate deliverables, or even a first date on
which to meet for a kickoff - that all five people relate to huge
idiosyncracies and generic forces that have to be aligned or overcome
before you can even say 'Hello'. This shows how difficult it is to 'start
something'.

Understanding the nature of these social relations in the above terms show
how difficult it is to script moments of fundamental change, as
hierarchical systems by the very fact that they are top down can
concentrate on managing systematic forces relatively effortlessly. That
which they can not predict or control remain lone dissident, strange or
abnormal voices, or 'sudden events'.

With the internet these idiosyncracies have been able to organize and
raise their weight in the ratio, and the internet of things will allow
these even further, bringing the sensornetwork data sets individuals can
handle to them on their devices. This acceleration of weak signals into
clusters, organized networks and flukes can not be managed anymore by
formats that are informed by and that inform systematic forces as the
nature of these forces has changed. People will start seeing more tales of
sharing and collaboration. The tables are turning. Pretty soon people will
start seeing competition for what it is: bullying.

And as we have changed the relative weight of the ideosyncracies ( read:
us) we can only expect brute force ( as we witness now) in the immediate
future, but this will show itself to be impotent in the longer run,

see:
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/kranenburg_collaboration.html


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