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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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:
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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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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It’s friday: watch videos!
1. Pixels: I stumbled upon this again recently. It’s astoundingly well-produced. Brilliant sound too.
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’.
After far too long, I finally finished Howard Zinn’s epic A People’s History of the USA. It’s a unique historical effort, a story of poverty, unrest and injustice. Compared to something like ‘The Penguin History of the USA‘, this is a story not focused on powerful men, but on unions, indigenous peoples, blacks and women.
Joe blogs. 