the most important lesson i learned from the arab spring is… “power to the people” just got an operating system upgrade. – Jim Moriarty (CEO, Surfrider Foundation + MAP Network) Yesterday was the one year anniversary of #Jan25, the first day of the Egyptian Revolution, the day regime change in Tunisia blossomed into an unprecedented [...]

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I’m currently working on a book about the effect of the network on global political power dynamics, and one of my big questions is how networks affect nation states. In the past few years networks have had dramatic effects on nation states, both positive and negative.  As always, these effects are complex and contradictory.  Networks [...]

A crowd that’s always connected can never be dispersed.  It’s always still out there. So I am back from holiday break and finally read the Wired digital activism article with the vaguely sinister title: #Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You by Bill Wasik. Wasik invented the flash mob by organizing strange and spontaneous [...]

The evil Darth Vader stands amid the broken and twisted bodies of his foes. He grabs a wounded Rebel Officer by the neck as an Imperial Officer rushes up to the Dark Lord. IMPERIAL OFFICER: The Death Star plans are not in the main computer. Vader squeezes the neck of the Rebel Officer, who struggles [...]

A Moment of Collaboration The overarching theme of this series on the history – and pre-history – of the Internet is conflict: different actors with different goals and visions shaping the medium.  The 1960′s saw a tension between the Cold War and the counter-culture.  The 1970′s saw the rise of commercial firms since advances in [...]

Making money the old-fashioned way [UPDATED] We idolize the billionaire geniuses of the Internet, people like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.  We associate their companies with innovation and creativity and, on a technical level, this is true.  But financially these firms have not innovated.  [...]

During the 1960′s, when computers filled rooms or entire buildings, they were tools of academic computation and war.  Yet there was an alternative vision, exemplified in the Whole Earth Catalog, that information could be collected and disseminated by and for the people. In the 1970′s, as computers became more reliable, smaller, and (marginally) less expensive, [...]

Is the Internet a boon to capitalists or anarchists? Tyrants or dissidents? The powerful or the powerless? The short answer is “yes.” The Internet has made fortunes in e-commerce just as it aids hackers who wish to attack online storefronts (see Anonymous’s attack of Amazon.com in 2010).  The Internet makes it easier for oppressive governments [...]

Tonight Personal Democracy Media hosted a flash conference: From the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street and Beyond: The Future of Networked Democracy.  Memes were disseminated.  One was the definition of an election as a “planned insurrection,” a phrase coin by the deathcore band Molotov Solution and improved upon by Clay Shirky.  Another was “the [...]