Personal Democracy Forum 2008
Note by Thirsy Mind:
Robyn Chase
Zipcar Co-founder
For entrepreneurs, problems are opportunities. All these problems based on the end of abundance – global warming, congestion, infrastructure.
Cost-benefit analysis. We try to reduce costs. We think of ownership – everything we use has to be owned. Car, pools, proprietary networks. But sometimes the costs are enormous, and you just want a slice of the benefits. This how social networks are taking off.
1. Find excess capacity
2. Create platforms for other to share & invest in it
With Zipcar, we changed the cost equation. Only pay for the 2 hours/day you use the car. There are unforeseen benefits – I can use a different kind of vehicle depending on each use. This is the platform people are working on. Take the concepts of Web 2.0 to material things – and we need to do this a lot because of global warming.
Goloco, my other startup. Ridesharing. Excess capacity.
In Bogota, they close roads on Sundays and let people walk, skate, cycle. Found an excess capacity.
My husband is working on something where you share your router’s excess capacity for an Obama 08 event.
Highway system: gas taxes aren’t working because that use will decline. The answer will be user fees – like congestion pricing. I want to use devices like Onstar to allow for charging highway usage, like the EasyPass.
This is how we can deal with these challenges – resource constraints, population growth, global warming.
Gilberto Gil
Minister of Culture, Brazil
Since 2003, when I took office, we’ve been looking into digital technologies as cultural phenomenon. Insisted on the role of culture in policy-making. The value of cultural diversity in the equation. Using the day to day inputs of technologies, without the drawbacks of classical revolutionary action.
Traditional politics is failing in advancing democracy and social development. The rise of peer2peer culture (and counter-culture) will challenge this. Governments will acknowledge sooner or later. What I see in Brazil is that these new movements don’t come from traditional politics, don’t depend on representative democracy. Operate outside electoral system, and influence it to some degree. People are more eager to engage in new and proactive way.
21st century technologies present a huge challenge to regulation. This obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. The distribution of intellectual property is the best way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But we see regulators everywhere bluntly calling this ‘piracy’.
Many corporations and governments around the world have positioned themselves conservatively, and are trying to block the new. Every revolution brings this reaction. Digital distribution of IP presents a threat.
We must be ever-vigilant as technology can be used as an excuse against society and individuals’ interest. We need to humanize and politicize this technology. Regulations need to ensure open access to knowledge, not just business as usual. Quotes Lessig on preserving the open nature of the internet.
Today, in Brazil, we have people using new technologies. This is a breath of fresh air, a sign of an emerging creative society.
Van Jones
Green for All
My powerpoint is usually ‘the powerpoint Al Gore would do if he were black’. But let’s talk about the hope that I have.
There are two problems we cannot opt out of: the economy and the environment. Hansen announced today we are really at the last moment for global warming. I used to think global warming was about polar bears. Then Katrina and California wildfires came along. Most of the people who died in California were Latino farm workers. They didn’t have cell phones – the governor called everyone with a phone and told hem to get out, so they burned alive in the fields.
We’re about to experience stagflation. We’re going to get a new president, but stagflation is not kind to presidents, think of Jimmy Carter. How do we deal with this? Well, if drill our way to new oil, we’ll burn the planet. If we don’t, people will summer. How can we grow the economy with burning the planet?
The answer is to create a green economy that’s prosperous enough to lift people out of poverty. Millions of houses need insulation, solar panels. That’s a lot of money. A World War 2-level program to kickstat economy, diversify our energy sources. What’s in the way of the Green New Deal? All those people don’t know each other, haven’t worked with each other, can’t get in touch.
All the parts are there to save the world, but there is no platform linking people. You all are the ultimate solvers of this problem.
My fear about digital revolution: we’re getting more and more data, we know the iceberg we’re about to hit. But how do we aggregate this wisdom – not data – to create social capital and social networks. Connect the PhDs and the PH-dos. Combine the green and digital revolutions, and we can have a political realignment.
If we stand together, we can finally live up to these problems. Connect people who most need work to the work that needs to be done.
Hyperpolitics, American-style
Mark Pesce
University of Sydney
1. Hyperconnected.
Our genome has been the same for 50,000 of 60,000. The sapient paradox – why didn’t we construct technology earlier? We had the kit, the hardware, but it took 50,000 years to build the software. Then it overflowed. First into civilization. Then you get cross-civilization transmission, across latitudes (Jared Diamond, Eurasia axis).
Civilization was very innovative when it appear 9,000 years ago. But it became stable and conservative – not really changing. But then Gutenberg came along. Thus another way to share knowledge. Peer review was a radical form of sharing.
This created cities, mass markets, mass society. Liberalism is the ideology of this era. The Economist: halfway there. In a decade, we went from half the planet never making a phone call, to half the planet owning their own phone. By 2010, 75% of humanity will be connected. Mobile phones may be the most potent development tool ever.
We think of them as social, but for those who have never been connected, it brings the power of sociability. Until recently, no correlation between cell phones and economic growth.
The beginning, not the end. We had the Web for a decade before figuring it out. 6 year gap between wiki software and Wikipedia – we needed to figure it out. SMS was dismissed by telecoms as a sideshow. Now humanity sends 43B messages per annum.
This is transforming the social landscape of human culture.
2. Hypermimesis
Children are experts in mimesis, learning by mimicking. Chimp toddlers are better at cognitive tasks, but human children are better at aping. This is our advantage.
Successful behaviours will get incorporated into a global kit. And now we have access to the behaviours of more people than ever before.
A decade ago, this hardware was new and unknown. Now behaviour is distributed globally and instantly. This creates the kits for a new civilization, we learn something with every text message.
What does it look like? Fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. Sounds very liberal. Facing opposition from conservative forces. But every law that is designed to limit human information has failed.
China has admitted it failed at censorship, now trying to work through self-censorship, internalizing the threat. Record industry couldn’t shut down P2P. Bloggers took down Gonzalez, as USA attorney general, despite DC establishment. Couldn’t happen a decade ago. We’ve been shoved into a post-modern panopticon, where everyone can see and learn from everyone else.
Any trend multiplied across the 3.3B is going to be big. Wikipedia is the first attempt to encapsulate the sum of human knowledge. Not just academic and scientific success. The calculus has shifted from the liberal area, where knowledge is hoarded and use for power. The returns of altruism beat the virtue of selfishness.
But Wikipedia isn’t transparent or democratic. Wikipedia is controlled by Wikipedians. New articles are getting rejected. Growth has slowed, may sometime stop. Pedians claim they are holding the line. Think they’re holding it pure. This is a highly conservative impulse. Befits archivists and librarians. But these mechanisms are not conservative. Use sock-puppets, back-channel, non-transparent channels. The Register exposed this.
Now hypermimesis kicks in – other groups will mimick these same techniques. So now Wikipedians will either fossilize it entirely, with a conservative response, OR learn to embrace the chaos.
This is the same challenge we all face every day. All our liberal institutions are backed against the same buzzsaw.
3.No Governor
I was taking pictures of an airport information device at San Fran airport. This made someone from the Secret Service nervous. Sharing is the threat. It became pervasively available. Any attempts to control have collapsed.
We’re asked to believe that hyperconnectivity will be embraced by campaigns and those in power. That politics will be different. Bullshit.
This is not a crisis, not a lack of leadership. Obama created a very traditional network which is being activated for primaries and elections. What happens after the election? Doesn’t matter what he thinks, because the mob is in control. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to descend into a war against all (Hobbes). Connectivity begets mimesis begets empowerment.
Conflicts will emerge. Governments will try to stop. Then the guns will be trained on them. The future looks nothing like democracy. It sought to empower the individual, but the individual has now been empowered by a new social system. Now the world will move for all of us – not just Margaret Mead’s small groups.
Zipcar Co-founder
For entrepreneurs, problems are opportunities. All these problems based on the end of abundance – global warming, congestion, infrastructure.
Cost-benefit analysis. We try to reduce costs. We think of ownership – everything we use has to be owned. Car, pools, proprietary networks. But sometimes the costs are enormous, and you just want a slice of the benefits. This how social networks are taking off.
1. Find excess capacity
2. Create platforms for other to share & invest in it
With Zipcar, we changed the cost equation. Only pay for the 2 hours/day you use the car. There are unforeseen benefits – I can use a different kind of vehicle depending on each use. This is the platform people are working on. Take the concepts of Web 2.0 to material things – and we need to do this a lot because of global warming.
Goloco, my other startup. Ridesharing. Excess capacity.
In Bogota, they close roads on Sundays and let people walk, skate, cycle. Found an excess capacity.
My husband is working on something where you share your router’s excess capacity for an Obama 08 event.
Highway system: gas taxes aren’t working because that use will decline. The answer will be user fees – like congestion pricing. I want to use devices like Onstar to allow for charging highway usage, like the EasyPass.
This is how we can deal with these challenges – resource constraints, population growth, global warming.
Gilberto Gil
Minister of Culture, Brazil
Since 2003, when I took office, we’ve been looking into digital technologies as cultural phenomenon. Insisted on the role of culture in policy-making. The value of cultural diversity in the equation. Using the day to day inputs of technologies, without the drawbacks of classical revolutionary action.
Traditional politics is failing in advancing democracy and social development. The rise of peer2peer culture (and counter-culture) will challenge this. Governments will acknowledge sooner or later. What I see in Brazil is that these new movements don’t come from traditional politics, don’t depend on representative democracy. Operate outside electoral system, and influence it to some degree. People are more eager to engage in new and proactive way.
21st century technologies present a huge challenge to regulation. This obliges us to reinvent the way we do almost everything. The distribution of intellectual property is the best way of democratizing knowledge in the history of mankind. But we see regulators everywhere bluntly calling this ‘piracy’.
Many corporations and governments around the world have positioned themselves conservatively, and are trying to block the new. Every revolution brings this reaction. Digital distribution of IP presents a threat.
We must be ever-vigilant as technology can be used as an excuse against society and individuals’ interest. We need to humanize and politicize this technology. Regulations need to ensure open access to knowledge, not just business as usual. Quotes Lessig on preserving the open nature of the internet.
Today, in Brazil, we have people using new technologies. This is a breath of fresh air, a sign of an emerging creative society.
Van Jones
Green for All
My powerpoint is usually ‘the powerpoint Al Gore would do if he were black’. But let’s talk about the hope that I have.
There are two problems we cannot opt out of: the economy and the environment. Hansen announced today we are really at the last moment for global warming. I used to think global warming was about polar bears. Then Katrina and California wildfires came along. Most of the people who died in California were Latino farm workers. They didn’t have cell phones – the governor called everyone with a phone and told hem to get out, so they burned alive in the fields.
We’re about to experience stagflation. We’re going to get a new president, but stagflation is not kind to presidents, think of Jimmy Carter. How do we deal with this? Well, if drill our way to new oil, we’ll burn the planet. If we don’t, people will summer. How can we grow the economy with burning the planet?
The answer is to create a green economy that’s prosperous enough to lift people out of poverty. Millions of houses need insulation, solar panels. That’s a lot of money. A World War 2-level program to kickstat economy, diversify our energy sources. What’s in the way of the Green New Deal? All those people don’t know each other, haven’t worked with each other, can’t get in touch.
All the parts are there to save the world, but there is no platform linking people. You all are the ultimate solvers of this problem.
My fear about digital revolution: we’re getting more and more data, we know the iceberg we’re about to hit. But how do we aggregate this wisdom – not data – to create social capital and social networks. Connect the PhDs and the PH-dos. Combine the green and digital revolutions, and we can have a political realignment.
If we stand together, we can finally live up to these problems. Connect people who most need work to the work that needs to be done.
Hyperpolitics, American-style
Mark Pesce
University of Sydney
1. Hyperconnected.
Our genome has been the same for 50,000 of 60,000. The sapient paradox – why didn’t we construct technology earlier? We had the kit, the hardware, but it took 50,000 years to build the software. Then it overflowed. First into civilization. Then you get cross-civilization transmission, across latitudes (Jared Diamond, Eurasia axis).
Civilization was very innovative when it appear 9,000 years ago. But it became stable and conservative – not really changing. But then Gutenberg came along. Thus another way to share knowledge. Peer review was a radical form of sharing.
This created cities, mass markets, mass society. Liberalism is the ideology of this era. The Economist: halfway there. In a decade, we went from half the planet never making a phone call, to half the planet owning their own phone. By 2010, 75% of humanity will be connected. Mobile phones may be the most potent development tool ever.
We think of them as social, but for those who have never been connected, it brings the power of sociability. Until recently, no correlation between cell phones and economic growth.
The beginning, not the end. We had the Web for a decade before figuring it out. 6 year gap between wiki software and Wikipedia – we needed to figure it out. SMS was dismissed by telecoms as a sideshow. Now humanity sends 43B messages per annum.
This is transforming the social landscape of human culture.
2. Hypermimesis
Children are experts in mimesis, learning by mimicking. Chimp toddlers are better at cognitive tasks, but human children are better at aping. This is our advantage.
Successful behaviours will get incorporated into a global kit. And now we have access to the behaviours of more people than ever before.
A decade ago, this hardware was new and unknown. Now behaviour is distributed globally and instantly. This creates the kits for a new civilization, we learn something with every text message.
What does it look like? Fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. Sounds very liberal. Facing opposition from conservative forces. But every law that is designed to limit human information has failed.
China has admitted it failed at censorship, now trying to work through self-censorship, internalizing the threat. Record industry couldn’t shut down P2P. Bloggers took down Gonzalez, as USA attorney general, despite DC establishment. Couldn’t happen a decade ago. We’ve been shoved into a post-modern panopticon, where everyone can see and learn from everyone else.
Any trend multiplied across the 3.3B is going to be big. Wikipedia is the first attempt to encapsulate the sum of human knowledge. Not just academic and scientific success. The calculus has shifted from the liberal area, where knowledge is hoarded and use for power. The returns of altruism beat the virtue of selfishness.
But Wikipedia isn’t transparent or democratic. Wikipedia is controlled by Wikipedians. New articles are getting rejected. Growth has slowed, may sometime stop. Pedians claim they are holding the line. Think they’re holding it pure. This is a highly conservative impulse. Befits archivists and librarians. But these mechanisms are not conservative. Use sock-puppets, back-channel, non-transparent channels. The Register exposed this.
Now hypermimesis kicks in – other groups will mimick these same techniques. So now Wikipedians will either fossilize it entirely, with a conservative response, OR learn to embrace the chaos.
This is the same challenge we all face every day. All our liberal institutions are backed against the same buzzsaw.
3.No Governor
I was taking pictures of an airport information device at San Fran airport. This made someone from the Secret Service nervous. Sharing is the threat. It became pervasively available. Any attempts to control have collapsed.
We’re asked to believe that hyperconnectivity will be embraced by campaigns and those in power. That politics will be different. Bullshit.
This is not a crisis, not a lack of leadership. Obama created a very traditional network which is being activated for primaries and elections. What happens after the election? Doesn’t matter what he thinks, because the mob is in control. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready to descend into a war against all (Hobbes). Connectivity begets mimesis begets empowerment.
Conflicts will emerge. Governments will try to stop. Then the guns will be trained on them. The future looks nothing like democracy. It sought to empower the individual, but the individual has now been empowered by a new social system. Now the world will move for all of us – not just Margaret Mead’s small groups.
