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Reading

Tapscott vs Shirky (from Frog Design)

Selected quotes from a conversation between Don Tapscott (author of Wikinomics, prof. at Rotman) and Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody, Cognitive Surplus) in Frog’s corporate magazine ‘Design Mind‘.

Tapscott:

“The more appropriate metaphor for the growing loss of privacy today would be Frank Kafka’s The Trial, where the central character awaits trial and judgment from an inscrutable bureaucracy for a crime that he is not told about, using evidence that is never revealed to him, in a process that is equally random and inscrutable. Similarly, we could become the targets of social engineering, decisions and discrimination. And we will never really know what, or why…

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Reading

1934 | Gerd Arntz Web Archive

The Third Reich.gif

1934 | Gerd Arntz Web Archive.

Gerd Arntz: ‘The fact that the whole composition is a bit crooked, gives a ‘falling’ impression, is on purpose. The Third Reich wouldn’t last very long, I thought then.’

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Thinking

Avaaz hits 20m members, Beppe Grillo, and digital lessons for political parties

Aside from an no-new-news Observer interview with co-founder Ricken Patel, Avaaz hasn’t shouted about its milestone of 20m members. According to the Observer, these members make Avaaz the world’s biggest online campaign group. You have to admire their out-of-nowhere exponential growth:

Avaaz growth curve
Avaaz’s growth curve, from an Avaaz email (note additional 2.5m in just a few months)
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Thinking

Reimagining global democracy – the slideshare version

Here’s a quick version of my MA Global Governance paper on global democracy. It’s the same story, but with few words and many photographs. Cos that’s how the internet likes it.

 

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Reviewing

Review: Google and the World Brain

The story of Google Books is pretty astounding. The tech, the speed, the turning-the-book-industry-upside-down. As the best one-liner in the BBC/ARTE/ZDF/etc documentary, Google and the World Brain, had it: ‘if you do something illegal on such a massive scale, you can get away with it’. 

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Thinking

It’s friday: watch videos!

1. Pixels: I stumbled upon this again recently. It’s astoundingly well-produced. Brilliant sound too.

https://vimeo.com/10829255

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Thinking

Parliament Everywhere: designing a legislature for the 21st century

Parliaments are in trouble. Invented – in the form we know them – nearly 800 years ago to prevent the abuse of executive power, they struggle today to meet same goal. In the 21st century, executive power is no longer exercised from neat, single locations that are reflected in legislatures. If the democratic control of power is to be reasserted, alternative democratic innovations must be considered. This post looks at such potential innovations – and considers some of arguments for why they’re necessary. It argues that the location-less nature of the Internet may suggest a solution in the form of a multi-layered platform – a ‘parliament everywhere’.

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