Our utopian visions of the future, freed from present problems by human ingenuity and technical competence, might be possible on paper, but they are unlikely in reality. We have already made the biggest mistake, and spent 10,000 years perfecting a disastrous invention, then making ourselves ever more reliant on it. However, the archaeologists who give us glimpses of our ancestors, and the anthropologists who introduce us to our cousins, have been able to show us why we dream what we do. What we yearn for is not just our imagined future; it is our very real past.

Agriculture turns land that feeds thousands of species into land that feeds one. It literally starves other species out of existence.

Without a surplus of food, sustained military campaigns are simply not possible.

Among nomads, property becomes a burden if it accumulates. A society of equals, which places little value on what material wealth it does possess, is not fertile ground for property crime.

A group of nomads, finding itself unable to agree on an issue of importance, can always split into two or more groups, each of which can go its own way and implement the decision they believe to be the best. Farmers, however, are stuck where they are, and the best kind of democracy that a settled community can produce is the tyranny of the majority.

In the 1960s and 1970s anthropologists, such as Richard Lee and Yehudi Cohen, noticed the strong correlation between how societies produce their food and how they are structured socio-politically. Years of accumulated anthropological research showed that those who live by hunting and gathering show a very strong tendency to live in egalitarian, consensus-based societies.

!How!might!civil!society!actors!shape!the!data!revolution?!In!particular,!how!might!they!go!beyond!the!question!of!what!data!is!disclosed!towards!looking!at!what!is!measured!in!the!first!place?

In the age of social media, there are a myriad ways our online presence may be used against us by a multitude of adversaries. From stalkers to prosecutors, any public information that can be attached to our identities may be used to their advantage and our detriment. It is important that we are mindful of the resources we make available to potential attackers.

never post screencaps that show tabs. EVER.

Extreme efficiency of exchange, in other words, might come at the cost of developing new business contacts.

I accept bitcoins for the same reason that I accept normal money. Mainstream money is used to replace a specific trust relationship with a general one. I take British pounds from a specific person because I trust that I can exchange those pounds for something else within the general British pound-using community. Likewise, I take the bitcoins from the specific buyer because I trust that the broader Bitcoin community will accept them from me in exchange for something of intrinsic value. The main departure from normal electronic money is that Bitcoin uses a decentralised network in place of a central hierarchy. The advantages are anonymity, a sense of freedom and, it has been argued, a more resilient system.

Perhaps we can tinker with the word ‘money’ itself. It’s a mass noun, like you’d use for some kind of tangible substance, and it makes money sound like a ‘thing-in-itself’. As a kind of mental discipline, I prefer to use a different word: COGAS. It stands for ‘claims on goods and services’, which is all money really is. And now I have a word that describes itself, as opposed to one that actively hides its own reality. It sounds trivial, but the linguistic process works a subtle psychological loop, referring money to the world outside itself. It’s a simple way to start peeling back the façade.

There’s an ecological dimension to this, of course, which is my overriding concern. Our ability to exchange without knowing where things come from blinds us to the real core of the economy: not money, but the physical things we must wrench from the ground by human effort, which is underpinned by agricultural systems, and energised by sunlight, water and soil.

GDP is supposed to reflect what is created in society, but if my grandad builds me a table in his workshop, it’s not included in GDP, and if I buy a table in Ikea, it is. The former is not considered valid production, whereas the latter is. That is arbitrary, and obviously something has gone wrong.

Similar network effects arise with social platforms such as Facebook — in theory, you can opt out, but only if you don’t mind the penalty of social exclusion. What’s more, when integrated into a national legal system and backed by the threat of violence, the sanctions for dissent become rather persuasive. At the unsubtle end of the spectrum, the monarch may simply throw you in jail for not using her preferred currency.

Gold reveals the basic tension in the textbook definition of money — the idea that it can be both a store of value and a means of exchange. For the most part, when something is truly valuable in itself, people are disinclined to part with it (why swap rum for something else when you can just drink it?).

It’s a reassuring myth, one that obscures the deep difference between barter and monetary exchange. In the former, nothing is left unresolved and no faith is required. It’s a closed circuit, a like-for-like swap. By contrast, money transactions are never closed; you pass on an abstract, faith-based claim in exchange for a tangible good.

but this still means that every monetary transaction is a leap of faith. And faith has to be carefully maintained.

Shopkeepers accept the paper because they believe that it has abstract value — because, in turn, they believe that others believe it, too. The value is circular, predicated on each person believing that others believe in it.

I have an enduring memory of a TED talk in which he ripped a banknote into pieces, trying to make the point that the paper itself doesn’t have value

The best guides in this half-lit territory turn out to be not economists, but rather the loose bands of monetary mystics and iconoclasts who are developing strange new exchange technologies. They are a scattered tribe, with elders including the likes of Bernard Lietaer, Ellen Brown and Thomas Greco, sages passing on tips on how to breach the Monetary Matrix.

Money sounds like it’s an ordinary noun, a self-contained object. If it is a physical object, it must be paper or metal or digits on a computer. And yet, very few of us think a £5 note is merely a piece of paper: the same idea of £5 can be expressed in electronic or metal form, after all.

By contrast, money itself is more like a low-level programming language, very hard to see or to understand but closer to gritty reality. It’s like your computer’s machine code, interfacing with the hardware: even the experts take it for granted. You might need to explain to someone what a bond is, but nobody is ever ‘taught’ what money is.

To draw an analogy with computer coding, we might say that financial instruments are analogous to ‘high-level’ programming languages such as Java or Ruby: they let you string commands together in order to perform certain actions. You want to get resources from A to B over time? Well, we can program a financial instrument to do that for you.

The financial system exists, above all, to mediate flows of money, not to question what money is.

Weapons of the Weak is not just a political study, however; it is also an outstanding work of ethnography. Based on thorough research and careful, perceptive fieldwork, it manages to avoid some of the failings of traditional ethnography by its emphasis on the centrality of individual human beings in their particular situations. Whether or not it offers definitive answers to the questions it investigates, it certainly provides some solid ground to stand on in looking for them.

As a result, Scott suggests that the ideological superstructure must always be seen as a product of struggle, not as something preexisting.

Usando los datos Carlos Alberto hizo una visualización de ingresos/egresos por departamento.

cómo pensar en un sistema donde la práctica académica no siga reforzando la privatización del conocimiento al seguir centrada en la protección del autor y sus obras bajo derechos de propiedad, pero que, por otro lado, el hacer invisible al autor o matarlo signifique una circulación de obras como mercancías sin dueño, lo cual hace un gran favor al sistema capitalista al tener acceso a “free gifts”, es decir, conocimientos que son fácilmente incorporados en los circuitos de producción dominante.

Apple does not sell great design. It sells design that flatters its owner. (And Apple’s timing has been perfect to exploit the rising tide of wealth inequality.)

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Unfortunately, this process rarely actually happens the right way, often because the business people ask their data people the wrong questions to being with, and since they think of their data people as little more than pieces of software – data in, magic out – they don’t get their data people sufficiently involved with working on something that data can address.

In programming languages like C++, C# or Java a class usually would be defined in a source code. A class definition file (Desktop.cpp/ Desktop.cs/ Desktop.java) in these languages would be a dumb text definition file fed into a compiler to verify and translate.In an interactive and lively system like Pharo a class could be created like any other object by sending instance creation methods. The reason is simple: in a pure OO environment anything is an object, so even a class is an object. Remember: there are only objects and messages.

As the previous examples showed Pharo has very much in common with an operating system. The difference is that it is more a lively kernel and scriptable object system that one can easily persist and transfer and that is easily extendable using the Smalltalk language.

So Pharo is a like an easy transferable operating system moveable between systems and devices.

Post offices are ubiquitous across America — what if they could be retrofitted to also be Social Security offices and DMVs and passport offices and polling locations? What if folks who aren’t comfortable with fancy, modern websites could walk into their post office and have any question about government answered for them? Yeah

So putting together a single online resource like this is no small task. It would require the collaboration of local, state, and federal governments and agencies that have immense amounts of overlap in their missions and are very protective of their individually appropriated budgets

there is probably no more devastating counterargument to giving the authorities more sophisticated technology to interact with citizens than the ongoing NSA scandal

Government websites are notoriously frustrating trips back in time, and it’s virtually impossible to find out all the ways government could potentially help you.

I loved those days: writing post after post after post, day after day, forces a different mindset as a writer. You loosen up; you get conversational.

NS Taleb teaches that a system can be designed to be anti-fragile, to not only cope to small amount of stress but also become better and more resilient by it. And while this might be extremely difficult, Taleb also shows that small is truly beautiful thus for our discipline

using Cloud based services, despite their creators best intentions has considerable risks sinceAny Cloud based approach creates massive hugely attractive fragile Honeypots

“There’s been this brutal narrative of the digital native,” says Owens. “People think they already supposed to know this stuff, but they don’t.” But Known and other tools can help change that.

That would mean the shift to an economic system where the fruits of the most powerful technologies humans have invented are shared more equally among us. If we embraced work-saving technologies rather than feared them, and organised our society around their potential, it could mean being able to live a good life with a ten-hour working week.

But we live in a world not of steam, but of silicon, solar and synthetic biology. Yes, technology challenges existing business models and maybe even capitalism as we know it. The solution isn't economically illiterate nostalgia or wringing your hands about inevitable social unrest. Rather seeing "structural unemployment" – as Rupert calls it – as a threat, we should take it as an opportunity to build a society where we can have much more and work much less.

While Rupert's vision is that of a dystopian, socially fragmented future, Osborne's ambition is to return to the economics of the Victorians. The former see a world whose politics are increasingly incapable of resolving the problems of its time, while the latter pines for the ways of the steam-age.

That "us" refers to the array of oligarchs, billionaires and chief executives Rupert was speaking to.

In that respect, the recent victory of anti-eviction activist and ex-squatter, Ada Colau, in the race to become the Mayor of Barcelona is a sign of things to come. It is politicians like Colau, the Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras and Pablo Iglesias, the leader of a radical-left party which could form Spain's next government, who are the leading edge of something which Rupert fears is much, much bigger.

the guff from the government about "fixing the roof while the sun is shining"

If the state moved heaven and earth to create capitalism, what will stop it doing the same to ensure its survival and creating some kind of techno-fascism – less a transition motor and more a whack-a-mole game, bashing non-capitalist initiatives on the head as they emerge?

Abundance is already here – we have enough stuff but don't share it properly. Loads of people are already in bullshit jobs that don't need to happen – and technology hasn't changed that until now.

I think the choke point for the transition to postcapitalism comes when the market sector and non-market sector become round about the same size.

"The state has to be rethought as a transition motor," he says – meaning it needs to be reimagined as a vehicle for change rather than a defender of the status quo. "And transition's a long period – we're not talking about two years, we're talking about 50," says Paul.

The identity change is true closer to home as well as in the developing world, with traditional workplace identities evaporating.

Currently, Facebook, by providing free access to select websites, via its platform to a number of emerging economies, has become the internet to this substantive user base. Net neutrality here has evidently taken a backseat in the name of doing good and given Facebook a unique vantage point into database behaviour among this bop populace.

The question that remains is how to treat this rising populace as culturally diverse and yet refrain from exoticizing them; how to allow big data to be an empowering tool among emerging economies while simultaneously strengthening their institutions; and how to create alternative modes of inclusivity to the default neoliberal approach of the marketization of the poor.

The longevity of such social entrepreneurship lies in the belief that the state will continue to disappoint its citizens. Here, zones of marginalization become zones of innovation.

Lastly, far from the claim of these initiatives to being novel and unprecedented, we need to recognize that these surveillance systems have their roots in colonial practices of identification of the colonized.

Also, it is worth asking whether by embracing the bottom of the pyramid (bop) perspective of the poor as empowered consumers, are we in fact marketizing the poor?

what Owen Thomas calls ‘high tech racism’. Certain bodies are more ‘unreadable’ than others

While the West appears to be moving away from the convergence of datasets due to privacy laws, constitutional rights and public concern, these very initiatives in the global South are celebrated as acts of empowerment. Why the apparent contradiction?

when we pay attention to the debates about surveillance, privacy and net neutrality and the demand for alternative models and practices to sustain the digital commons, they are primarily driven by western concerns, contexts, and user behaviors from these privileged domains. This undoubtedly provides a thwarted view of the internet.

as our lives are dominated ever more completely by complex computer systems, it is a little disquieting to realise that perhaps our heroes must be as alien and inscrutable as our problems.

the engineer has started to operate as a visionary improviser, seeing an adjacent world-state within the world system and instantly imbuing it with the radioactive glow of moral mission

Where Otlet and Wells envisioned publicly funded, trans-national organizations, we now have an oligarchy of public corporations.

Google freely excludes sites from its index for reasons that it is under no obligation to disclose—the secrets of the Googlebot are Delphic mysteries known only to its inner circle of engineers.

The culture stood in stark contrast to the orderly, institutional tendencies of Otlet and Wells. Where Europeans were turning to their institutions in a time of crisis, many Americans were growing up in a value system that emphasized individualism and personal liberation. It was in this milieu that Licklider, Engelbart, and others began laying the foundations for the web we know today.

A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web

While these features have connected untold millions and created new forms of social organization, they also come at a cost. Material seems to vanish almost as quickly as it is created, disappearing amid broken links or into the constant flow of the social media “stream.” It can be hard to distinguish fact from falsehood. Corporations have stepped into this confusion, organizing our browsing and data in decidedly closed, non-transparent ways. Did it really have to turn out this way?

we will end up ‘a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots’

Open-source principles are a major point of distinction between DACs and the existing, overwhelmingly proprietary systems used for logistics, management and trading.

Imagine, for instance, a bike-rental system administered by a DAC hosted across hundreds or thousands of different computers in its home city. The DAC would handle the day-to-day management of bikes and payments, following parameters laid down by a group of founders. Those hosting the management programme would be paid in the system’s own cryptocurrency – let’s call it BikeCoin. That currency could be used to rent bikes – in fact, it would be required to, and would derive its value on exchanges such as BitShares from the demand for local bike rentals

And yet, on reflection, Rifkin’s examples turn out to be anything but collaborative at their heart. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are fiercely profit-driven, taking large cuts from all the exchanges they facilitate. They are middlemen themselves, albeit somewhat more efficient and open than their predecessors. What’s more, the digital payment systems that underpin their services are also highly centralised and very expensive.

As we know from public media, when products exist in the marketplace for reasons other than profit, it affects the whole market for the better. In other words, this kind of organization would be a public good as well as an academic one

software is created through a design thinking process, with iterative user research and testing performed with both educators and students. The result is likely to be software that better meets their needs, released with an understanding that it is never finished, and instead will be rapidly improved during its use.

While it's great that any member of staff can create a database, the IT department is then expected to maintain and repair it. The avalanche of applications can quickly become overwhelming - and sometimes they can overlap significantly, leading to inefficient overspending and further maintenance nightmares. For these and a hundred other reasons, purchasing needs to be planned.

This business model does not need, or even more it is prohibited, by an alternative Application Pattern, a pattern that it is Human centric, Human scale, that puts you in the center and does not see you as a data generation unit aggregated inside a giant swarm of people.

Personally, I think the people at Facebook made a stellar product. It's creepy how much they know about us, even creepier how much they care about this information, and scary that they are sharing it with governments. But it's also wonderful to be able to find nearly anyone in the world, contact them immediately, set up events, share media, etc. They have build a robust, incredibly impressive and functional platform that gets better every day.

Security. How hack-proof is Ello? Is the code going to be open sourced? How will we know if/when they are working with the NSA?

Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit.

the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets

The gentrification of hacking is… well, perhaps a perfect hack.

And before you know it, an earnest Stanford grad is handing me a business card that says, without irony: ‘Founder. Investor. Hacker.’

This process of gentrification becomes a war over language

This doublethink bleeds through into mainstream corporate culture, with the growing institution of the corporate ‘hackathon’

And so we see a gradual stripping away of the critical connotations of hacking. Who said a hacker can’t be in a position of power? Google cloaks itself in a quirky ‘hacker’ identity, with grown adults playing ping pong on green AstroTurf in the cafeteria, presiding over the company’s overarching agenda of network control.

‘hacking’ as quirky-but-edgy innovation by optimistic entrepreneurs with a love of getting things done

the revised definition of the tech startup entrepreneur as a hacker forms part of an emergent system of Silicon Valley doublethink

The countercultural trickster has been pressed into the service of the preppy tech entrepreneur class.

Here is where the second form of corruption begins to emerge. The construct of the ‘good hacker’ has paid off in unexpected ways, because in our computerised world we have also seen the emergence of a huge, aggressively competitive technology industry with a serious innovation obsession. This is the realm of startups, venture capitalists, and shiny corporate research and development departments. And, it is here, in subcultures such as Silicon Valley, that we find a rebel spirit succumbing to perhaps the only force that could destroy it: gentrification.

In the context of a complex system – computer, financial or underground transit – the political divide is always between well-organised, active insiders versus diffuse, passive outsiders. Hackers challenge the binary by seeking access, either by literally ‘cracking’ boundaries – breaking in – or by redefining the lines between those with permission and those without. We might call this appropriation.

Thus a single manifestation of a single element of the original spirit gets passed off as the whole.

Despite the hive-mind connotations of faceless groups such as Anonymous, the archetype of ‘the hacker’ is essentially that of an individual attempting to live an empowered and unalienated life. It is outsider in spirit, seeking empowerment outside the terms set by the mainstream establishment.

I was attracted to the hacker archetype because, unlike the straightforward activist who defines himself in direct opposition to existing systems, hackers work obliquely. The hacker is ambiguous, specialising in deviance from established boundaries, including ideological battle lines. It’s a trickster spirit, subversive and hard to pin down. And, arguably, rather than aiming towards some specific reformist end, the hacker spirit is a ‘way of being’, an attitude towards the world.

For all his protestations of innocence, it’s clear that Draper’s curiosity was essentially subversive. It represented a threat to the ordered lines of power within the system. The phreakers were trying to open up information infrastructure, and in doing so they showed a calculated disregard for the authorities that dominated it.

For all his protestations of innocence, it’s clear that Draper’s curiosity was essentially subversive. It represented a threat to the ordered lines of power within the system. The phreakers were trying to open up information infrastructure, and in doing so they showed a calculated disregard for the authorities that dominated it.

The internet promises open access to information and online assembly for individual computer owners. At the same time, it serves as a tool for corporate monopolists and government surveillance.