#netocracy

[protoslacker]

Songs are funny things

I'm not very dumb, but not very smart either. And I'm old and I work. So there's whole bunches of stuff that's important that I'm pretty ignorant about. I am glad to be curious. As ignorant as I am, I often fall into rabbit holes.

I was thinking about songs. I want people to sing songs. There's a quote by Pete Seeger about songs which I like very much:

“Songs are funny things. They can slip across borders. Proliferate in prisons. Penetrate hard shells. I always believed that the right song at the right moment could change history.”

I was mulling over the trouble with people singing other people's songs. And thought of a lecture that Lawrence Lessig gave a long time ago. Searching for it the very first google result was a link to Leonard Lin's blog random($foo). Lin had put the lecture on the Internet and it's kind of cool to see how it was done back then. I headed over to YouTube to watch Lessig's talk at the O.Reilly Open Source Conference in July of 2002.

The talk is still worthwhile. At the time some of my creative friends thought Lessig was a sort of villain, so his talks got talked about.

At Tumblr someone I am very pleased to have encountered is Dr. Damien P. Williams. Something about meeting him at first on here is knowing what a kind and good person he is prior to discovering his deep erudition about the social implications of technology. These days I follow him on Mastodon where he pointed to an episode of NPR'S Code Switch with Safiya Noble dealing with "the complex questions that arise when algorithms and AI intersect with race."

It's a wonderful interview which really does touch on complexities, but the part that really made an impression was her background in advertising before returning to graduate school and earning her Ph.D. It put the economics of enclosure front and center in discussing AI.

I'm describing my fall down a rabbit hole and I think the next thing I engaged with was a post by Andy Baio at WAXY, Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning. Songs are funny things.

After that I landed on a review of a new book by Yanis Varoufakis by Christopher Pollard at The Conversation, Is capitalism dead? Yanis Varoufakis thinks it is – and he knows who killed it. The book is entitled Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism and will be available in print in the US in February. I listened to several interviews with Varoufakis and searched for literature on Neo-feudalism. It's certainly an idea I want to learn more about.

Back in the early oughts there was a book, Netocracy : the new power elite and life after capitalism by Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist. For a little while the ideas were discussed quite a lot online. Remembering those conversations I did not anticipate how incredibly concentrated the autocracy would become, i.e., how few feudal lords there would be. And I paid too little attention to Chinese technology. But Bard coined a term for a new underclass called the "consumtariat" which seems quite handy and has stuck with me over the years.

It's going to take me a long while to wrap my head around neo-feudalism. But I suspect it will be time well spent.

Wendy Grossman at net.wars has a recent post, The end of ownership. The provocation for the post is a garage door opener which among other evils forces an ad on you before you can open the garage door. Grossman points to Cory Doctorow, The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot. I'd laugh, but it telling how fast technology and the tech-lords are enclosing us.

Who can sing songs and whose songs can we sing are urgent questions.

#neo-feudalism #netocracy #AI #ownership #rent #serfs #book #yanis varoufakis

[renegade-hierophant]

#gits #gits arise #pyrophoric cult #cyberpunk #netocracy #heterotopia

[digital-nugget]

Grimmerspace - Netocracy // Leon Tukker

#artstation #artwork #concept #art #sci-fi #city #metropolis #science fiction

[hydralisk98]

Angora-punk

Inspirations (V.1)= 

Third Generation Computing, (1960-1977), Trans-humanism, Cognitive Liberty, Morphological Freedom, DIY / Maker culture vs Nano Manufacturing Electricity Corporations, Socialism, Rogue Servitors, Linguistics, Nazi Victory TL, Simulated reality, consciousness, societal issues, philosophy (Western and Chinese), Robots, Droids and Synthetics, Genetic Engineering, Infomorphs, Exocortex, Shapeshifting, Retrocognition, Teleportation, Astronomical Far Future aka 0x10c, Cyberspace, Arcology, Biohacking, Hacking, Modding, Reincarnation, Adult Beforelife, Angels, UNIX, God = the Multiverse itself, Heat Death, The Last Question from Isaac Asimov, Penance, Ecology, Peer to Peer, Lisp programming, The Alchemist from Paulo Coelho, Limited Post-Scarcity system, Eternal Curiosity, Honesty, Respect, Technocratic Obligarchy, Enlightened Despotism, Liquid Democracy, Social Democracy, Electocracy, Timocracy, Technocracy, Coprorate Republic, Noocracy, Trotskyism, Netocracy, Nomocracy, Absolute Monarchy, Parlimentary/Constitutional Monarchy, Republic, Socialist State, Parliamentary republic, Presidential system, partially the  NSDAP and the CPSU, Memchevik, Nano manufacturing, Mixed reality, Corporate mass surveillance, Nanosocialism, FTL, STL, Planetary colonization, Parallel TLs, Alien lifeforms, Psychics, Vertical farming, Claytronics, Programmable Matter, Synthetic Biology, Quantum dot, Ambient intelligence, Blockchain, Civic tech, Cryptocurrency, Internet of things, Nanoradio, Personalized medecine, Whole genome sequencing, Small satellite, Modular robot, Infosphere, Powered Armor, WMD, Biological weapons, Nanoswarm, predestinated time travel, grey goo...

Inspirations (V.2)= 

Third Generation Computing, (1960-1983), Trans-humanism, Cognitive Liberty, Morphological Freedom, Maker culture vs Nano Manufacturing & Electricity Corporations, Nano Socialism, Rogue Servitors, Societal Issues and Philosophies, Linguistics, Robots, Droids, Synthetics, Synthetical Biologies, Exocortex, Consciousness, Shapeshifting, Retrocognition, Psychics, Teleportation, Dimension Travel and Predestinated Time Travel, Biohacking, Hacking, Angels, UNIX, God = Multiverse itself, LISP, P2P, Penance, Heat Death, The Alchemist, Ecosystems, Decay, Liquid Democracy, Enlightened Despotism, Timocracy, Timocracy / Aristocracy, Absolute Monarchy, Socialist Commune, German National Socialism (Nazi ideology), Vertical farming, Claytronics, 3D printing, IoT, Blockchain, Open Source, Ambient Intelligence, Small Satellites, Biological weapons, Personalized Medecine, Genetical Engineering, Time Travel (Predestinated or Dimensional), Mixed Reality, Mass Surveillance, Technophobia, Alternate History, Cryptography, Reactive Adaptation...

(EDITING SOON)

[mkmsmartestcitieshumantitties]

netocracy refers to a perceived global upper-class that bases its power on a technological advantage and networking skills,

[internationaltechnosociology]

Chapters: Media literacy in the digital age Taste and aesthetics evolution review Understanding disruption Information intelligence update The Individual: a sales trick 3D Politics Netocracy Digital dark age Imagination age Transhumanism & Post-humanism Technological singularity / Accelerationism Mythology, Religion, Media and Social Media Vitality VS Identity Intimate technology, wearables and the cloud Glass-Vision, Virtual & Augmented realities = internet of experience Digital inventology Connections and the symptoms of disconnection

[blondebeastie]

Let the Mountain come to me! (Vacuum) another project of Swedish musician, producer and sociologist Alexander Bard (an author of the very interesting book "Netocracy", Damn I think I need a net library I think, another book to recommend to everyone - "Digging deeper and wider than any previous effort into what the information revolution truly means, Netocracy is the must-read. Netocracy is the unsurpassable how and when of this whole revolution." Kjell A. Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale, authors of Funky Business The world will not live without logos, but neither will capitalism silently take over democracy. What comes next? Forget capitalism and the class struggle, we are witnessing the birth of a whole new world. The digital revolution is, in fact, changing things far more dramatically then the hype-mongers of tech Internet ever imagined - only not in the way that they and their investors hoped. The move from a society dominated by print and broadcast mass media to the age of interactivity is at least as dramatic as the move from feudalism to capitalism. After capitalism comes attentionalism. Those who can harness global networks of information and master new forms of communication will control business, finance and legislation, forming the new business and government elites. They will inherit the power; they are the Netocracy.Driven by the Internet and mobile communications, networks are turning into the major means of doing business, organising action, getting knowledge; the organising principle for the information age. Simply put, networks will make the world go round. So controlling the networks of this world will soon count for more than controlling the capital. Harness the right network and yuo can do anything, anywhere. Manuel Castells has described the Internet as the most extraordinary technological revolution in history. But he also suggests it is as underdeveloped socially as it is overdeveloped technologically.

http://www.thenetocrats.com/

And don`t forget to watch the song video :)

#Vacuum #Alexander Bard #Netocracy #Let the montain come to me

[protoslacker]

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire. And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian. The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is our electoral process still fit for purpose?

#big data #netocracy #silicon valley #billionaires #donald trump #cambridge analytica

[the-netocrat]

One example of a typical netocratic dilemma is the recurrent choice between exploitation and imploitation. Suppose two netocrats meet on a far-off island with picturesque ruins and beautiful beaches, but with no tourist industry at all. This is a typical netocratic destination, a perfect place for someone who practises tourism in the form of imploitative consumption. When the two netocrats are sitting on their sun-loungers, sipping cold drinks at sunset, they are faced with the question of whether they should keep the island a secret and only tell their closest friends of its existence, or build hotels and an airport and then market the island as a destination for all the tourists of the world: put simply, should they improve it and then sell it to the highest bidder. If they choose to keep the island secret, they will be following an imploitative strategy; if they choose to make a profit from their discovery, they will be following the opposite, exploitative strategy. The difference between netocrats and classical capitalists is that the netocrats have these two options. Knowledge of the island has such a high value to the netocrats, and profit such a relatively low one, that exclusivity could well weigh heavier than economic profit. For the capitalist there is no choice. For him the accumulation of capital is the central project in life, a project compared to which everything else is subordinate. But the netocrat does not share this view. Conscious of the fact that his new-found paradise would lose its unique aura if it was exploited, the netocrat can choose, thanks to his independence from and lack of interest in capital, to imploit the island instead: to keep it secret and reserve it for the pleasure of himself and his netocratic colleagues.

Bard, Alexander; Söderqvist, Jan (2012-02-24). The Futurica Trilogy (p. 97). Stockholm Text Publishing AB. Kindle Edition. 

#netocracy #Island #Exploit #Imploit

[jonasenander]

Nationalism

The nationalistic winds keep on blowing in the world. The old world fights back. We are many who has left it behind and embraced a world without borders and with information supreme.

France stops trains from Italy with immigrants, Right-wing populism breaks through in Finland, last Swedish election right-wings came into the government... etc. (I dont take responsibility for the links, they are only for anchoring in AFK). 

It seems to me that the people that are left behind are fighting some kind of war with the people that have left. And the tool of choice is to go back to nationalism and try to define old values and thus bringing back old days.

I hope that the world do not break down until the new political parties gain power. 

#politics #netocracy #nationalism

[protoslacker]

Another reason why we shouldn’t trust Google to provide us with credible, accurate and neutral information is that its main concern is advertising, not informing. That’s why we should be very worried. While public institutions such as universities, schools, libraries, archive and other memory spaces are loosing state funding (the book focuses on the USA but Europe isn’t a paradise either in that respect), private corporations and their black-boxed information-sorting tools are taking over and gaining greater control over information and thus over the representation of cultural groups or individuals.

Regine Debatty at We Make Money Not Art reviews Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble

#internet #knowledge #algorithm #neoliberalism #netocracy #book

[protoslacker]

It’s now clear that this shift in the use of behavioral data was an historic turning point. Behavioral data that were  once discarded or ignored were rediscovered as what I call behavioral surplus. Google’s dramatic success in “matching” ads to pages revealed the transformational value of this behavioral surplus as a means of generating revenue and ultimately turning investment into capital. Behavioral surplus was the game-changing zero-cost asset that could be diverted from service improvement toward a genuine market exchange. Key to this formula, however, is the fact that this new market exchange was not an exchange with users but rather with other companies who understood how to make money from bets on users’ future behavior. In this new context, users were no longer an end-in-themselves.  Instead they became a means to profits in  a new kind of marketplace in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products.  Users are the source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process.

Shoshana Zuboff in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The Secrets of Sureillance Captialism

GOOGLE AS A FORTUNE TELLER

Shoshana Zuboff

#surveillance capitalism #internet #google #netocracy #shoshana zuboff

[protoslacker]

The gist of it all seems to be that ASU gets a captured student-consumer audience in exchange for tuition discounting at its for-profit online division.

 Tressie McMillan Cottom at tressiemc. Lattes and Letters

(note the exchange between Clay Shirky and Cottom in the comments)

#education #starbucks #netocracy

[protoslacker]

The sharing economy appropriates a language of change and collectivity (e.g., “collaborative consumption”) to proselytize for business models that atomize individuals further, reducing their social usefulness to the spare capacity they can mobilize and marketize.

Rob Horning at Internal Exile commentig on Paul Mason in The New Statesman. Paul Mason: what would Keynes do?

The revolution in IT and how it is transforming our world in ways that even economists are struggling to understand.

#economics #Internet #netocracy #sharing economy

[protoslacker]

If we want to resist voluntarianization, therefore, we have two tasks. We should continue to expose the expanding extraction of profit from labor forms premised on “intrinsic rewards.” And we should seek the liberation of activities and energies captured by the alienated non-labor of social media.

Geoff Shullenberger at Jacobin. The Rise of the Voluntariat

#labor #commons #commonweal #netocracy

[protoslacker]

It's a matter of trust. Right now trust in the wisdom of our elites is at an all-time low, and for good reason. If the people in power won't trust the public with scary information, why should we trust them with scary new powers?

David Atkins at Hullabaloo. Ellsberg, Kissinger, and the cultural danger of extreme secrecy in government 

#surveillance state #secrecy #netocracy #trust #security