Leonidas Oikonomakis on Argentina, Greece and how to kill a revolution

As a follow-up to the post about community organisation in Athens, I quote here Leonidas Oikonomakis who recounts the history of the early-2000s piqueteros movement in Argentina. It’s a good reminder of how the elite can easily co-opt a budding revolution with (false) promises of prosperity and security. This is why it’s so important to hang on to the principles of self-organisation regardless of who’s in government, and to keep a firm distance from any centralised power structures regardless of how benevolent they may appear to be. Oikonomakis’ article was published over at ROARMag.

“The first to revolt in Argentina, already since the 1990s, were the so-called piqueteros. The movement of the unemployed, many of them victims of Menem’s privatizations, that had adopted the road blockade as a tactic (and later on the blockade of boulevards, bridges, supermarkets, as well as government buildings) in order to highlight the social, political, and economic problems of the country.

Yet the piquetero movement never managed to mobilize the masses or capture the support of middle-class Argentinians in its challenge to the country’s political and economic status quo; at least not until the so-called corralito: the banning of cash withdrawals higher than 250 pesos per week (1000 per month) that the De la Rua government and Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo imposed.

Only after they were denied access to their banking accounts did the middle classes — the ladies with the cacerolas and the pensioners that you may remember from TV — take to the streets. And it was exactly at that moment that things got dangerous for the system.

In an excellent documentary by Giorgos Avgeropoulos and his team, Exandas, there is a shocking scene: amidst protests against the coralito, and amidst screams referring to the thieves in Parliament (does it ring any bells, my Greek compatriots?), there appears an old man, presumably a pensioner, who faces the camera and cries out:

“Now we are fighting? Now that our pocket has been picked? Welcome coralito, it is one stage beyond consciousness. If that’s what it takes for the people to take to the streets, welcome coralito… the sheep have rebelled. The revolution of the animal farm.”

He was right. And the system knew it.

-“Que se vayan todos!” the Argentinians were shouting. Away with them all!
-“Να φύγουν όλοι!” they were shouting in the squares of Greece. Away with them all!

And their discontent was targeted towards similar directions: the Argentinians were protesting against the IMF for the debt and the neoliberal reform conditionalities it was demanding, but also against the country’s political establishment which it considered corrupt. The Greeks, on their part, are protesting against the Troika for the debt and the neoliberal reform conditionalities it demands, as well as against their country’s political establishment, which is characterized by corruption, nepotism, and clientelistic relations. And there’s one more thing the Argentinians and the Greeks have in common: they both started doubting the dominant economic paradigm as such: capitalism.

And if in Greece the squares have just started to learn how to ‘breathe freely’, to self-organize, to decide and act together, in Argentina things had become more dangerous for the political and economic status quo.

The piqueteros started coordinating with each other, started occupying workplaces and established workers’ cooperatives for their administration (watch Naomi Klein’s and Avi Lewis’ The Take for a wonderful impression of this alternative system of ‘grassroots socialism’), while at the same time they began experimenting with economic systems based on barter, or direct exchange.

The piqueteros also started operating communal kitchens, came up with neighborhood assemblies, and launched cooperative efforts to run bakeries, construction teams, and libraries. According to Benjamin Dangl, in Dancing with Dynamite, this process gave birth to more than 200 worker-run factories and businesses throughout the country, with more than 15.000 people working in these cooperatives in sectors as diverse as car-part production and balloon factories. All of this took place during the one year of Eduardo Duhalde’s transitional government.

[…]

In summer 2002, Eduardo Duhaldo resigned after backing Nestor Kirchner as his favorite successor. Elections were announced, and the main two competitors were Carlos Menem, the man who more than anyone else represented the Argentinian crisis, and Nestor Kirchner, a political outsider, former governor of Santa Cruz province – the only option for the Argentinean left.

Menem won the first round but, seeing that it would be virtually impossible to beat Kirchner in the second, he stood down. And so, Nestor Kirchner was elected President of Argentina, with the smallest ever percentage gained by a presidential winner: a mere 22 percent of the votes.

Upon his election, Kirchner refused to implement the IMF’s conditionalities, which included further cuts in social spending and a shrinking role for the state in the economy, while at the same time announcing that he would pay back to the country’s private creditors 30 cents on every dollar that it owed to them, using the effective threat of a total default instead. Of course, he paid back the IMF in full, but refused to continue receiving loans (and orders) from it.

In addition, Kirchner introduced policies that raised the minimum wage, protected workers’ and unions’ rights, and expanded social security programs to more unemployed and workers in the informal sector. He increased public spending on education and housing, and put limits on the prices of the formerly state-owned enterprises privatized by Menem. Moreover, Kirchner’s government took a solid stance on the prosecution of criminals involved in the 1976-83 dictatorship.

And of course, Kirchner did little to hide his intentions, which were to save the Argentine state from implosion and reconstruct the capitalist system in the country, reversing the extreme neoliberal measures that the previous governments had taken and replacing them with a more humanistic or social democratic orientation.

Kirchner’s measures brought middle class Argentinians back home from the streets — to the normalcy they were asking for. At the same time, while it cannot be denied (and it should not be underestimated either) that this certainly helped middle and lower class citizens to get back on their feet, it should also be noted that Kirchner’s measures clearly played a decisive role in the demobilization of the country’s once powerful social movements.

Some piquetero leaders were coopted and given positions in the government while certain civil society organizations were offered state subsidies. Those who insisted in their resistance were treated with police repression, isolation, and exclusion from the public sphere.

The rest was a matter of time. Soon, the radical experiments on direct democracy and life beyond capitalism lost their  momentum, giving way to Kirchner’s ‘capitalism with a human face’ (which, no matter how you mask it, remains capitalism, albeit slightly more regulated by the state). “In other words,” As Benjamin Dangl summarizes, “Kirchner was handing out crumbs, when what many demanded was revolution.”

[…]

In a way, the challenges faced by the piqueteros were nothing new. Throughout history, social movements around the world have been faced with an eternal and seemingly intractable dilemma: how to bring about lasting social change? While some have opted for a revolutionary road to capture state power, others chose the electoral road to obtaining state power. Others still have chosen to ignore the state altogether and build alternative institutions of direct democracy and autonomous self-management from the grassroots up.

Ahead of the Greek elections, and against the backdrop of widespread excitement around Europe about the expected electoral victory of a ‘radical’ left-wing party, maybe we should turn back and try to remember what happened in other parts of the globe when a left-wing party answered the eternal dilemma facing social movements with a decisive choice for the ‘parliamentary path’ to state power.

Maybe then we‘ll be able to answer the question asked by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer: “Why do social movements consistently lose out to electoral institutional politics once the center-left takes over a regime?” And maybe then, at last, we will realize that we need to come up with new slogans to keep the Greek squares from falling prey to the same fate as that befell the piqueteros of Argentina.”

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Henrietta L. Moore and Sabine Selchow on conceptualising politics on the Internet

Anthropologist Henrietta L. Moore and political scientist Sabine Selchow offer here some interesting thoughts on how to think about political activism on the Internet. This approach seems fruitful when discussing, for example, the recent ACTA-protests, a phenomenon that started on the Internet and was even about the Internet, but that still eventually grew into something with genuine “real world” consequences. The article was originally published on openDemocracy here.

“The meteoric rise in popularity of the Pirate Party in Germany, the place of Facebook and Twitter in the recent upheavals in the Arab world, the potential for e-government, serious games for economic progress and development, citizen journalism, and, last but not least, the viral KONY2012-campaign show all too clearly that the Internet is of increasing relevance in people’s life in general, and in politics in particular.

As a result, it is a favoured topic for political analysts and commentators who offer theories as to the role of the Internet in and for contemporary politics. With each new civil society upheaval, the debate reignites asking whether the uses of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, are significant enough to merit the relabelling of these upheavals as ‘Facebook-’ or ‘Twitter-revolutions’.

More generally, there is an ongoing (at times heated) debate about if and how the Internet could be a solution for a number of democracy-related problems that analysts detect within the contemporary global context. Many of the commentaries comprising this debate are of value, including James Curran’s elaboration on ‘why the Internet has changed so little’, in the sense that it has failed to meet many of our expectations for political and social change. This and other analyses of the Internet offer rich and varied discussion of the relevance of the Internet for political analysis.

And yet, despite this, contemporary political accounts of the role and significance of the Internet are somewhat ‘tame’ or even ‘tamed’. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that the majority of political analyses concerned with the Internet start with questions that are shaped by pre-determined, discipline-specific concerns – for example, issues related to the Internet’s (potential) impact on politics, and whether it can help to overcome the specific (normative or realist) problems that political analysts diagnose as shortcomings in and of contemporary democracies. Typically, these shortcomings relate to issues of participation and deliberation. On the one hand, analysts set out to investigate whether the Internet can improve the style and level of political participation: and on the other side, there is a sense – and indeed a hope – that the Internet could serve as a (Habermasian) public sphere, an open and accessible space for genuine debate and discourse on social concerns. Guiding these analyses is a dual conceptualisation of the Internet where it is understood both as a tool, a (new kind of) medium that is used by political actors to do something, and as a (new kind of) space, a sphere in which (new) things happen.

The second reason for ‘tame’ analyses of the Internet in political science is the tendency to treat it as something separate from the ‘real’ world. Many analysts employ an unexamined distinction between the offline and the online world. More often than not, this conceptual separation is implicit and naturalised; it is, for example, apparent when analysts ask for the impact of the Internet ‘on’ something. This categorical distinction between the offline and the online appears to be a v2 of the notion of the ‘great divide’, one of the key foundational notions of International Relations theory.

Acknowledging these two trends in the majority of existing approaches to the Internet by political analysts is important. The very idea or notion of ‘the Internet’ that many mainstream political analysts deploy is trimmed and ‘tamed’ through the norms and concerns ‘natural’ to their existing views of the world and the philosophical assumptions that underpin them. In other words, it is a very specific kind of Internet that is being described, investigated and debated.

[…]

In our chapter in Global Civil Society 2012, we address these problems directly and suggest an alternative understanding of the Internet to trigger a rethinking and a re-configuration of the conceptual frame that has guided political analyses hitherto. We start from different premises. Two conceptual steps are at the heart of our endeavour. First, instead of conceptualising the Internet as a virtual space and / or tool for activism, or indeed as a ‘new type of territory’, as some analysts do, we follow theorists of digital culture and suggest that the Internet must be understood as a ‘set of interactions in process’. This involves envisaging the Internet as a set of resources, engagements, relations and structures through which the world is constantly renewed – rather than as a material object or single entity.

As we explain, this alternative conception of the Internet is a consequence of its two main features, namely its digital nature (which means that it is immaterial and constantly open to change) and the ‘ethos’ of Web 2.0 (which relates to a culture of sharing, editing, re-editing, producing, re-producing, creating new forms of relation, prosuming etc).

Secondly, instead of thinking of the Internet as a thing separate from the ‘real’ world, that is, instead of working with the notion of a ‘great divide’ between the offline and the online (real/virtual, material/symbolic), we suggest that scholars take recent studies seriously and acknowledge that the Internet today is fundamentally intertwined with socio-political structures and ‘offline’ lived realities.

Our reconfiguration of the conceptual frame through which to study the Internet holds two interlinked implications for political analysts’ scholarly imagination. Once we decide that the distinction between the ‘offline’ and the ‘online’ does not readily reflect contemporary lived reality, the Internet occupies a different position in our thinking about politics. Rather than asking how or if the Internet has the potential of changing or improving the ‘real’ world, we need to consider it as a part of a (political) world brought into being through complex sets of interactions between the offline and the online.

[…]

Understanding the Internet as a set of interactions in process throws into question the value of the conceptual metaphors of ‘tool’ and ‘space’, because questions about what is happening ‘on’ the Internet, and how the internet is used, by whom, and with what impact on the ‘actual’ world no longer have sufficient analytical purchase. The internet is not a tool or a space for politics, but a set of interactions in process that constitute the political, and indeed the social and the economic. As such it is not a tool or a space to enable life, but life itself.  This is what David Gauntlett intends in Making is Connecting when he says that the internet is a set of processes in which “people are rejecting the givens and are making their world anew”. And as Henrietta Moore argues in Still Life, this requires political and social analysts to focus as much on the concepts of creativity and imagination as they do on those of structure, space and intersection. We need a politics of the internet, and indeed a politics that starts from somewhere else.”

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Rick Falkvinge on the Internet and the power of narratives

In this blog post from TorrentFreak, Rick Falkvinge points out what I think is the ultimate motivation behind the copyright regime: the control of the flows of information, and thereby of the people, by a small elite. I’ve been meaning to write something on this issue myself, but of course Rick puts it more eloquently than I possibly could, so I’ll just quote him instead:

“The net changes the world’s power structures in a much more fundamental way than changing the way a few groups of entrepreneurs are able to make money. The net is the greatest equalizer that humankind has ever invented. It is either the greatest invention since the printing press, or the greatest invention since written language. The battles we see are not a result of loss of money; they are caused by a loss of the power of narratives.

Imagine if you were able to write all the world’s news for a week. You would have no bounds in what you wrote, and nobody would question your news – it would be accepted as unconditional truth. What would you write?

The people who sit on this kind of power hold the power of narrative. They hold the ability to literally dictate truth from lies. If you are able to determine and describe the problems that society must solve, and perhaps even how to solve them, you hold the greatest power of all.

Some people, when faced with this thought experiment, think in terms of affecting public opinion on some favorite issue. Those who are a little more daring think in terms of getting rich. But it doesn’t stop there, far from there. If you held the power of narratives, you wouldn’t need money ever again in your life: you could be a god. You could quite literally be seen as a walking deity on the planet.

The ability to interpret reality and tell other people what is true and what is false is the greatest power that humans have ever held. The power of narratives.

In the Middle Ages, this power was held by the Catholic Church who interpreted the Bible in sermons all over Europe. The Bible was written in Latin, and you could even be sent into exile for unauthorized reading of that Bible in Latin.

The Church had no reason to fear any laws being made against their interest, for they controlled the entire worldview of the legislators. They defined the problems and they defined the applicable solutions.

In this day and age, some crazy guy named Gutenberg made it possible to bring Bibles by the cartload into the streets of Paris?. In French! Readable without interpretation! This tore down the church’s power of narrative like a house of cards under a steamroller.

In this, the Church saw themselves as the good guys and wanted to set the record straight, to prevent the spread of disinformation. They had learned that they were the carriers of truth and could not unlearn having this position. Thus, the penalties for using the printing press gradually increased all over Europe, until it hit the death penalty: France, January 13, 1535.

Yes, there has been a death penalty for unauthorized copying. Guess what? Even the death penalty didn’t work.

But as illustrated here, cracking down on the copying technology wasn’t really a matter of preventing copying. It was a matter of maintaining the power of narratives – the complete and total control over the world’s knowledge and culture.

Between the printing press and now, that power has been held by the operators of printing presses. They have observed, they have interpreted, they have retold the story of reality. Recently, the printing presses have received company from radio and TV broadcasts, but the model has remained the same: a small, small elite has determined what the world should know and how they should relate to the events going on.

The net changes everything.

All of a sudden, anybody can publish their ideas to the world in 10 minutes. And just like the Catholic Church, the previous powerholders of the narrative can’t deal with the situation this time around either, and see it as their job to restore order.

The gatekeepers of music – the record labels – are a very minor player in this game. It is much, much larger than that. The net redefines the entire previous classes of power. Those able to tell their story, rule. Those being arrogant enough to demand that people should just keep listening to them for no reason will lose their powers of influence.

Just like when the means of spreading ideas and information accurately, quickly and cheaply came along with the printing press in the mid-1450s, those who now hold the power of narrative are fighting the already-happened loss of their power of narrative with everything they have, and using any excuses they can think of. The actions are the same from every regime in the world – only the excuses differ.

In China, it is sometimes worded as “stability” or “morale of the nation”.

In some very religious Muslim countries, “sanctity of the Prophet” has been heard as motive.

In the West, it can be “terrorism”, “file sharing”, “organized crime”, and “pedophilia”.

Everywhere on the planet, the current regime – not necessarily meaning elected political leaders – choose locally acceptable excuses to crack down on the net. But the actions remain the same, and are aimed at preventing something much more fundamental.

The power for every person on the planet to observe, interpret, and tell their story is breaking the power of money. A fat bank account can no longer buy belief in a story. This equalization of humankind is something tremendously beneficial for about 99.99% of humanity – for the ones trying to destroy the net with every trick in the book are the very few that are being equalized downwards.

Just like in the 1450s. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

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ACTA update VII

So, the opposition against ACTA seems to have now reached a majority in the European parliament. Here’s a blog post from today by Rick Falkvinge:

“Recently at a press conference, another party group in the European Parliament came out in rejection of ACTA. This time, it marked a significant milestone, as a majority of the party groups in parliament has now said they will reject it.

It was the liberal group ALDE who declared their intent to reject, yesterday afternoon, European time. According to MEP Christian Engström, who can do the game theory of Parliament in his sleep, this means that there is now a declared majority against ACTA! This majority consists of the Greens (where the Swedish Pirate Party resides), the Left, the Social Democrats, the eurocritical EFD, and the newly-declared liberal group ALDE.

This is tremendously good news, as ACTA as a whole stands or falls in the European Parliament. If the Europarliament rejects ACTA, then it’s a permakill. Boom, headshot. The other side of the coin is that if parliament accepts it, then it is going to shut the doors for very necessary reform for at least a decade, barring a cataclysmic event.

However, this majority against ACTA is not like other majorities, which are predictable and stable. The European Parliament is fairly unique among parliaments, in that the MEPs are neither required (or indeed expected) to toe the party line, and while the party whip exists, it is mostly of the fun kind. A recommendation, if you like. Deviations from the declared party line is not only common but expected in pretty much every vote. So even though the party groups have declared their party lines, this has no effective binding force on the people doing the actual button-pressing, and it’s the tally of them that counts in the end.

This mechanism works both ways, of course. The largest party group, the conservative EPP, is still weakly in favor of ACTA – but even there, many Members of the European Parliament are expected to go against the party line and vote against it.

A draft opinion was introduced in ITRE, the Industry Committee, this Tuesday. Monopoly hawks are trying to frame ACTA as being about the right to property or not (which is hogwash). We need to reinforce that the people of Europe will not stand for this mail-order legislation from monopolists that erode our freedoms of speech and fundamental liberties,

The current committees working on ACTA are JURI, INTA, DEVE, ITRE, and LIBE (those four-letter words are committe names). The time is now to mail the members of these committees and express your feelings about why this piece of bullshit mail-order corporate favor needs to be soundly rejected by a parliament elected by the people. You can use this web page (in Swedish, but understandable) to quickly get the e-mail addresses of the members of the respective committees. Do so now. Right now and over the following weeks. All several million of us. To make sure that all several million really do that, make sure that your friends of those several million are aware of the situation.

It won’t hurt if you tailor your criticism of ACTA to reflect why you’re mailing the respective committee, of course. So JURI is Legal Affairs, INTA is International Trade, DEVE is (third world) Development, ITRE is Industry, and LIBE is Civil Liberties. A message that has an early indication that shows that the message is tailored to its recipient is taken much, much more seriously. Feel free to replace just that particular tailoring between committees and keep the rest of the mail identical.

And in breaking news, I’m just informed that JURI has postponed its vote for a month – the Greens and Social Democrats were against postponing and wanted to kill ACTA outright, but this did not happen. A very very important reminder that it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

We’re balancing on a very thin line here. And the safety net has been taken out. It’s up to us to guarantee the survival of our own civil liberties, but the good news is that it only takes a small piece of action from several tens of thousands each to make a huge difference. I’m informed from the inside of the European Parliament that the citizens’ pressure on Parliament to reject ACTA has weakened noticeably. Now, exactly now, is the time to ramp it back up.

So mail those committee members now. Today. Right Effing Now.”

Another place to find those committee members and their contact info is here.

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Michel Bauwens on peer production and economies of scope

Michel Bauwens is the founder of The Foundation for P2P Alternatives and one of the leading proponents of peer production principles today. Recently, he’s been publishing a series of articles on the Al Jazeera website on the various ways he sees the proliferation of peer production is currently in process of changing our societies. Now, he’s gathered the points in those articles into a lengthy essay published over at Shareable. I can only quote a short excerpt here, but I recommend reading the complete essay for the sheer breadth of the argument Bauwens is constructing.

“And what are economies of scope? As a teaser, for now, this short definition: “An economy of scope exists between the production of two goods when two goods which share a common cost are produced together such that the common cost is reduced.”  In other words, something that brings down the common cost of a factor of production, not by producing more of a unit but through shared infrastructure costs.

[…]

Indeed, economies of scale work well in periods of energy ‘ascent’, when more and more energy is coming online, but they work less and less in periods of energy  ‘descent’ when the overall supply of energy and resources are diminishing. What you need then are economies of scope, when  you can ‘scale up from one’, as with today’s emerging “making on demand” infrastructure.

Economies of scope is exactly what peer production (in its different iterations of open knowledge, free culture, free software, open and shared designs, open hardware and distributed manufacturing, etc.) is all about.

Let’s recap what is wrong with the current global system, which is entirely predicated on economies of scale, and actually in many instances makes economies of scope illegal.

1. Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let’s call this feature, runaway ‘pseudo-abundance’.
2. The current system believes that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let’s call this feature, enforced ‘artificial scarcity’.

Peer production methodologies are based on the exact opposite economic and social DNA. Peer production communities believe that knowledge is a commons for all to share, and hence, no innovation can be withheld from the human population as a whole.

In fact, withholding a life-saving or world-saving innovation is seen as unethical, and this represents a true value inversion. And peer production designs for distribution and inclusion, i.e. small scale, even personal fabrication. Planned obsolescence, which is a feature and not a bug of the current system, is totally alien to the logic of peer production. In other words, sustainability is a feature of open design communities, not a bug.

[…]

So, what are the economies of scope of the new p2p age? They come in two flavors:

1. The mutualizing of knowledge and immaterial resources
2. The mutualizing of material productive resources

The first principle is easy to understand. If we lack knowledge as individuals (and nobody can know everything) as a community, local or virtual, it is much more likely that someone knows. Hence, the mutualizing of knowledge and ‘crowd-accelerated innovation’, now already a well-known feature of the collaborative economy. But the advantage of scope is created when that knowledge is shared, and thus, it can be used by others. With this social innovation, the common cost of the joint production factor that is knowledge, is dramatically reduced.

Take the example of the paradigmatic Nutrient Dense Project.

This global community of agrarian workers and citizen scientists is interested in experimenting with better nutrients to obtain better quality food. Hence joint research can be carried out to test various nutrients in various soils and climate zones, and they will instantly benefit not just the whole participating community, but potentially, the whole of humankind. Strategies that are based on privatizing intellectual property, cannot obtain such advantages of scope, or at least, not at that level.

[…]

The second principle, of mutualizing physical productive resources, is exemplified [in] collaborative consumption. The general idea is the same. Alone, I may lack a certain tool, skill, or service, but seen from the point of view of a community, it is likely someone else has it, and that other person could share, rent or barter it. No need to all possess the same tool if we can access it when we need it. Hence the proliferation of p2p marketplaces.

Let’s take an illustrative example: car-sharing. Car-sharing projects can be mutualized through the intermediary of a private company which owns the cars (fleetsharing, like Zipcar), through p2p marketplaces which link car users to each other (RelayRides and Getaround), or through nonprofits or public entities (Autolib in Paris). But they all achieve economies of scope. According to a study cited by ZipCar, for every rented car, there are 15 fewer owned cars on the road. And carsharing members drive 31% less after they join. So, in 2009 alone, car-sharing diminished global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly half a million tons.

Imagine similar developments in every sector of production.

So, what will the new system look like if economies of scope become the norm and replace economies of scale as the primary driver of the economy and social system? We already mentioned the global open design communities, and we suggest that it will be accompanied by a global network of microfactories, who are producing locally, such as the ones that the open source car companies like Local Motors and Wikispeed are proposing and which are already prefigured by the networks of hackerspaces, Fablabs and co-working spaces.”

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David A. Banks on activism and technology

Interesting musings here by David A. Banks on the use of technology within the Occupy movement. The essay was originally published on the Cyborgology blog at The Society Pages.

“Most of our interactions with technology are rather mundane. We flip a light switch, buckle our seat belts, or place a phone call. We have a tacit knowledge of how these devices work. In other words, we have relatively standard, institutionalized, ways of interacting with familiar technologies. For example: if I were to drive someone else’s car, even if it is an unfamiliar model, I do not immediately consult the user manual. I look around for the familiar controls, maybe flick the blinkers on while the car is still in the drive way, and off I go. Removal of these technologies (or even significant alterations) can cause confusion. This is immediately evident if you are trying to meet a friend who does not own a cell phone. Typical conventions for finding the person in a crowded public space (“Yeah, I’m here. Near the stage? Yeah I see you waving.”) are not available to you. In years prior to widespread cell phone adoption, you might have made more detailed plans before heading out (“We’ll meet by the stage at 11PM.”) but now we work out the details on the fly. Operating cars and using cell phones are just a few mundane examples of how technologies shape social behavior beyond the actions needed to operate and maintain them. The widespread adoption of technologies, and the decisions by individual groups to utilize technologies can have a profound impact on the social order of communities. This second part of the Tactical Survey will help academics, activists, and activist academics assess the roll of information technology in a movement and make better decisions on when and how to use tools like social media, live video, and other forms of computer-mediated communication.

“The Master’s Tools” or, The Apparent Hypocrisy of Apple Computers in Zuccotti Park

Skeptical journalists and talking heads were quick to point out an apparent hypocrisy within the Occupy Wall Street movement. How can these hippies protest corporations when they are using Apple computers? The earliest of these pronouncements came from a New York Times piece that ended with:

‘One day, a trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Adam Sarzen, a decade or so older than many of the protesters, came to Zuccotti Park seemingly just to shake his head. “Look at these kids, sitting here with their Apple computers,” he said. “Apple, one of the biggest monopolies in the world. It trades at $400 a share. Do they even know that?”’

These sorts of observations are usually left unchallenged. Eric Randall, writing in The Atlantic, noticed this trend and wrote:

‘Depicting protestors sitting on their MacBooks fits in with the broader narrative the media has settled on, one that depicts a disorganized group of well-educated college grads who can’t figure out how to stay on message. The MacBook seems always to be used as a sort of tongue-in-cheek “stuff white people like” condemnation of the jobless, disenfranchised protestors who can somehow swing a $1,300 computer.’

This is nothing new. Ever since the “Battle for Seattle” Western news outlets have used this particular narrative to discredit activists and reasserts the legitimacy of status quo consumerism. Sociologist Richard J.F. Day comments on this rhetorical device in his book Gramsci is Dead: “This is an extremely common trope of exclusion by inclusion, which works by trying to show that They (anarchist activists) are no less tainted with the stain of capitalist individualism than We (good capitalist citizens) are, and therefore have no right to criticize the status quo.”

Members of OWS have responded to these sorts of accusations, but (predictably) little has changed. Randall quotes the occupywallst.org blog‘s response:

‘This is a specious argument, that if taken to its conclusion would preclude the use of any product to those angered by the injustice of its producer. If you disagree with the policy of GE’s board, you cannot own a refrigerator, if a major paper conglomerate cooks its books you may not use toilet paper. This protest is against injustice committed by the greedy, not commerce itself or the products of corporations.’

This appears to be an intractable problem. The powerful get to where they are by making lots of people need (and therefore buy) their stuff. They become an obligatory point of passage.  An alternative is to engage in “lifestyle politics” and avoid the use of technologies that are incompatible with your politics. This, however, usually means you are spending considerable time and effort building new capacities from the ground up, and not using your energy and resources to actually fight what you see as wrong in the world. To the extent that fighting for change and building alternative capacities are mutually exclusive tactics, a collective must make a decision on time horizons and overall goals. In a pluralist social movement like #OWS, there is enough capacity to do both. Some can fight with the problematic tools that are currently available (e.g. Apple computers and Twitter) while others work on new technologies that are less connected to the corporations.

Tactic 3: Pluralist movements must recognize the failures of the existing sociotechnical social order, while also developing alternative capacities. Using computers made in sweatshops and for-profit social networking sites that have dangerous privacy policies are a necessity for effective augmented activism in the short term. Sustained, long term actions should also be working towards alternatives to these technologies.

Building Alternative Capacity

Since the eviction of almost every physical occupation in the United States, occupiers (especially the geeky ones) have been hard at work finding new and inventive ways of coordinating and connecting. One of these efforts is TheGlobalSquare.org– a multilingual, open-source social networking platform that would offer a “platform for the movement.” The media has already billed the project as “Occupy Wall Street Builds Facebook Alternative” but that only tells half the story. Building an alternative to Facebook also means building an alternative set of behaviors. Services like Twitter and Facebook are built with a certain kind of user in mind. They can be used for activism, but they are built for monetizing social activity. This means identity-protecting pseudonyms are forbidden, and censorship is negotiable.

Social media technologies are built with equal parts computer code and social norms. The assumed relationship of the individual to the collective is built into the system. For Facebook that means being open to everyone. Its institutionalized through and by the default settings of your account and the corporate business model. For Twitter, it means talk and connect as much as possible, but within the bounds and abilities of state authorities to suppress free speech on the web. Global Square’s stated philosophy is (in part):

‘The Global Square recognizes the principles of personal privacy as a basic right of individuals and transparency to all users as an obligation for public systems. While User Profiles will allow for as much privacy as the individual desires (technology permitting), Squares, Events, and Task Groups must be, at minimum, completely transparent to their user groups, and Systems must be completely transparent for full auditing capability by all Users.’

Here, again, we see the delicate interplay of transparency and privacy that characterizes Occupy Wall Street. For Global Square, privacy of the individual is paramount, but that privacy is nested within two levels of transparency- transparency of collectives to its constituent individuals, and global transparency of governing sociotechnical systems to all users. Chris Kelty used the term recursive publics in his book Two Bits to describe communities of open-source coders that develop platforms that allow for and sustain the community. Global Square represents a similar social recursion: it is a platform to build capacity for new platforms of capacity building.

Tactic 4: Corporate-owned social media tools are not politically ambivalent. Technologies have embedded within them, assumed relationships and social organizations. Activists taking advantage of social media must recognize the subtle influences these technologies have on social action. If possible, new capacities for augmented activism must be built and maintained.

Coda

Granted, the recursion can only go so deep. The code for Facebook or Global Square still run on the problematic hardware part 2 opened up with. The construction of open source hardware is much more complicated and resource intensive. This begs the question: Is it possible to have widely available digital technology in a world without exploited labor? Are the rare earth metals in our smart phones counter-revolutionary? What would a socially just version of Moore’s Law look like? These are questions left to future posts and other authors. What activists can and must do now, is enroll the expertise of engineers and scientist to explore these questions. This might mean activists learning the skills of engineering and science, but it might also mean creating a revolutionary computer science. Creating a computer for the people will be no easy task, and might mean creating a totally new technical artifact. It may also mean redefining technological progress to include lateral shifts that produce similar computational power but in more socially just ways. It is not enough to use these tools for good, we have to make new tools that are good.”

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Kathy Acker on writing, copyright and the Internet

Here is an excerpt from a 1995 essay by the author and theorist Kathy Acker. Her thoughts on the way the Internet could potentially change the role of writing and copyright in society are certainly interesting in view of the more recent rise of the blogosphere and citizen media. The essay originally appeared in The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association and is collected in Acker’s book Bodies of Work: Essays (1997). Read the whole essay here.

“If we look at the literary industry today, writing is in trouble. Very few writers who spend most of their time writing and those who want to spend most of their time writing, can make a living by doing what they do most the time and by what they love to do most. Those who can and do support themselves writing do so, on the whole, by virtue of something called copyright. Copyright’s existence, I believe, is based on the following assumptions or sentences: An author is the only person who has written her or his own work; an author owns her or his own work.

Now in the first sentence—an author is the only person who has written his or her own work—the assumed definition of identity is questionable. For instance, I do not write out of nothing, or from nothing, for I must write with the help of other texts, be these texts written ones, oral ones, those of memory, those of dream, etc. In the second sentence, an author owns her or his own work, the verb to own must be questioned.

In other words, as writers we depend economically on copyright, its existence, because we are living and working, whether we like it or not, in a bourgeois-industrialist, in a capitalist society, a society based on ownership. One needs to own in order to survive, in fact, in order to be.

Our society, however, is in the process of, or has already changed into, a postindustrial ex-national economic beast. I hope that I am saying this correctly. As economic grounds change, so do all others. Both language and communications and the place of language and of communications in our society are rapidly changing.

For instance: I teach writing courses at the San Francisco Art Institute. Each year, fewer and fewer of my students read books. I don’t mean that they don’t read. They do, though they might not admit it. They read magazines, ‘zines, they go to art performances, to spoken word events; they eagerly participate in such events; they buy CDs in which rock starts and poets perform. More and more students and, I might add, my friends, and myself are using the Internet as a location where we can place our work. For the moment, the Net is a free zone… for those who can afford or access the necessary equipment. Whether it will remain free or whether our government will be able to enact strict controls, or whether various multinational corporations will be able to turn the Net into a cross between TV media land and a shopping mall, an elephantine version of America Online, this no one knows. Certainly, there are those who think that the Net cannot be controlled. Now, I have no ideas whether or not it will be, that is, whether or not it can be. But either way, there is one thing I suspect. I suspect that copyright as we now define it will become a thing of the past.

I have taken a long-winded route to make one simple point, something that I think most writers now know: if it is at this historical moment difficult for a writer to make a living by depending on copyright, in the future it may prove impossible for all but the very, very few.

It is not the case that the Net is providing an alternative method of book publishing and distribution. Not at the moment, as the technology stands. No one is going to download a whole book, for it’s far easier to run to the nearest bookstore. The existence of the Net is threatening the literary industry in another way: my students, people who work, which probably means that they work more than eight hours a day and have little time to read, many, many of the people in this society are preferring to engage in writing and in writerly activities outside the realm of books. And so to a large extent, outside the realm of copyright as copyright now exists.

[…]

If we get rid of copyright as it now exists, do we have to throw writing away? In order to answer this question, I think that it’s necessary to try to see clearly, to see the society in which we’re living. I should say societies, for sometimes the only entities that make our societies single seem to be McDonald’s hamburgers and Madonna. We need to see how we as writers fit into our societies as and while these societies are changing. How can we, as Hannah Arendt says, even in worlds that seem to have become inhuman, remain obligated to these worlds? Obligated, for being writers, our job is to hear and put together narrations and so to give meaning even to what seems to be or is inhuman. How can I, as a writer, be of use to and in my societies? That is the question that underlies the one of copyright.

I think that it is hard to understand what writing is in our society because writing has become so entangled with the literary industry. Entangled to the point that there no longer seems to be any difference between the two. For instance, if a writer is not big business, she or he is not a good, that is, finally, not a publishable writer.

Let me paraphrase and so repeat Hannah Arendt’s question: To what extent do we remain obligated to a world even when our presence is no longer desired in that world? Are we, writers, obligated to the literary industry and to the society behind that industry? Here is Hannah Arendt’s answer: “Flight from the world in dark times of impotence can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored.” Flight does not mean abandonment.

As it now stands, the literary industry depends upon copyright. But not literature. Euripedes, for instance, wrote his version of Electra while Sophocles’s “copyright” was still active. Not to mention Shakespeare’s, Marlowe’s, and Ford’s use of each other’s texts. My worries with copyright, however, are not so academic. My worries concern the increasing marginalization of writers and of their writings in this society. Whenever writers are considered marginal to a society, something is deeply wrong, wrong in that society and wrong with the relations between writing and the society. For to write should be to write the world and, simultaneously, to engage in the world. But the literary industry as it now exists seems to be obfuscating relations between this society’s writers and this society.

Once more we need to see what writing is. We need to step away from all the business. We need to step to the personal. This is that I mean by flight. Business has become too heavy, too dominant. We need to remember friends, that we write deeply out of friendship, that we write to friends. We need to regain some of the energy, as writers and as readers, that people have on the Internet when for the first time they e-mail, when they discover that they can write anything, even to a stranger, even the most personal of matters. When they discover that strangers can communicate to each other.

The bestowing of meaning and, thus, the making of the world, the word as world: this is what writing is about.

[…]

Back to Hannah Arendt’s words. You see, my lazy mind never goes anywhere: it only returns. Writing, as defined by the literary industry, is all about individuals. I own my writing; that is copyright. “Power arises,” Arendt writes, “only where people act together, not where people grow stronger as individuals.”

To write is to do other than announce oneself as an enclosed individual. Even the most narcissist of texts, say Nabokov’s Lolita, reaches out to, in Lolita’s case grabs at, its reader. To write is to write to another. Not for another, as if one could take away that other’s otherness, but to another. To write, as Gertrude Stein and Maurice Blanchot both have said, is to write to a stranger, to a friend. As we go forward, say on the Net, perhaps we are also going back, and I am not a great believer in linear models of time, to times when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship. “The ancients,” comments Arendt, “thought friends indispensable to human life, indeed that a life without friends was not really worth living.”

Friendship is always a political act, for it unites citizens into a polis, a (political) community. And it is this friendship that the existence of copyright (as it is now defined) has obfuscated.

The loss of friendship, the giving over of friendship to business based on individualism, has caused loss of energy in the literary world. Think, for a moment, with how much more energy one does something for a lover or for a close friend than when one acts only in the service of oneself.

In his remarkable essay about the writings of his friend Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot opposes two kinds of relationships, that of friendship and that of totalitarianism. Both Blanchot and Bataille lived through Nazism and Stalinism. A totalitarian relationship, Blanchot states, is one in which the subject denies the otherness, therefore the very existence of the other person, the person to whom he or she is talking. Thus, the totalitarian relationship is built upon individualism as closure. Individualism as the closing down of energy, of meaning. Whereas, when I talk to my friend, when I write to her, I am writing to someone whose otherness I accept. It is the difference between me and my friend that allows meaning; meaning begins in this difference. And it is meaning, the meaningfulness of the world, that is consciousness. You see, I am finally talking about my writing.”

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Noam Chomsky on intellectual property

This is an excerpt from the Q&A period of a speech given by Noam Chomsky at Washington State University on April 22, 2005. He points out how the intellectual property regime has nothing to do with “progress”, but rather with preventing it. This applies not only to individual companies or people but also whole nations, which is why intellectual property rights figure heavily in international trade negotiations.

“That’s a very interesting question. It has an interesting history. The World Trade Organization, the Uruguay round that set up the World Trade Organization imposed, it’s called a “free trade agreement”. It’s in fact a highly protectionist agreement. The US is strongly opposed to free trade, just as business leaders are, just as they’re opposed to a market economy. A crucial part of the Uruguay round, WTO, NAFTA, and the rest of them, is very strong (what are called) intellectual property rights. What it actually means is rights that guarantee monopoly pricing power to private tyrannies.

So take, say, a drug corporation. Most of the serious research and development, the hard part of it, is funded by the public. In fact most of the economy comes out of public expenditures through the state system, which is the source of most innovation and development. I mean computers, the internet. Just go through the range, it’s all coming out of the state system primarily. There is research and development in the corporate system, some, but it’s mostly at the marketing end. And the same is true of drugs.

Once the corporations gain the benefit of the public paying the costs and taking the risks, they want to monopolize the profit. And the intellectual property rights, they’re not for small inventors. In fact the people doing the work in the corporations, they don’t get anything out of it, like a dollar if they invent something. It’s the corporate tyrannies that are making the profits, and they want to guarantee them.

The World Trade Organization proposed new, enhanced intellectual property rights, patent rights, which means monopoly pricing rights, far beyond anything that existed in the past. In fact they are not only designed to maximize monopoly pricing, and profit, but also to prevent development. That’s rather crucial. WTO rules introduced product patents. Used to be you could patent a process, but not the product. Which means if some smart guy could figure out a better way of doing it, he could do it. They want to block that. It’s important to block development and progress, in order to ensure monopoly rights. So they now have product patents.

Well if you take a look at, say, US history. Suppose the colonies after independence had been forced to accept that regime. Do you know what we’d be doing now? Well first of all there’d be very few of us here. But those of us who would be here would be pursuing our comparative advantage and exporting fish and fur. That’s what economists tell you is right. Pursue your comparative advantage. That was our comparative advantage. We certainly wouldn’t have had a textile industry. British textiles were way cheaper and better. Actually British textiles were cheaper and better because Britain had crushed Irish and Indian superior textile manufacturers and stolen their techniques. So they were now the preeminent textile manufacturer, by force of course.

The US would never have had a textile industry. It grew up around Massachusetts, but the only way it could develop was extremely high tariffs which protected unviable US industries. So the textile industry developed, and that has a spin off into other industries. And so it continues.

The US would never have had a steel industry. Again same reason. British steel was way superior. One of the reasons is because they were stealing Indian techniques. British engineers were going to India to learn about steel-making well into the 19th century. Britain ran the country by force, so they could take what they knew. And they develop a steel industry. And the US imposed extremely high tariffs, also massive government involvement, through the military system as usual. And the US developed a steel industry. And so it continues. Right up to the present.

Furthermore that’s true of every single developed society. That’s one of the best known truths of economic history. The only countries that developed are the ones that pursued these techniques. The ones that weren’t able… There were countries that were forced to adopt “free trade” and “liberalization”: the colonies, and they got destroyed. And the divide between the first and the third world is really since the 18th century. It wasn’t very much in the 18th century, and it’s very sharply along these lines.

Well, that’s what the intellectual property rights are for. In fact there’s a name for it in economic history. Friedrich List, famous German political economist in the 19th century, who was actually borrowing from Andrew Hamilton, called it “kicking away the ladder”. First you use state power and violence to develop, then you kick away those procedures so that other people can’t do it.

Intellectual property rights has very little to do with individual initiative. I mean, Einstein didn’t have any intellectual property rights on relativity theory. Science and innovation is carried out by people that are interested in it. That’s the way science works. There’s an effort in very recent years to commercialize it, like they commercialize everything else. So you don’t do it because it’s exciting and challenging, and you want to find out something new, and you want the world to benefit from it. You do it because maybe you can make some money out of it. I mean that’s a… you can make your own judgment about the moral value. I think it’s extremely cheapening, but, also destructive of initiative and development.

And the profits don’t go back to individual inventors. It’s a very well studied topic. Take one that’s really well studied, MIT’s involved: computer controlled machine tools, a very fundamental component of the economy. Well, there’s a very good study of this by David Nobel, a leading political economist. What he pointed out and discovered is the techniques were invented by some small guy, you know working in his garage somewhere in, I think, Michigan. Actually when the MIT mechanical engineering department learned about it they picked them up and they developed them and extended them and so on. And then the corporations came in and picked them up from them, and finally it became a core part of US industry. Well, what happened to the guy who invented it? He’s still probably working in his garage in Michigan, or wherever it is. And that’s very typical.

I just don’t think it has much to do with innovation or independence. It has to do with protecting major concentrations of power, which mostly got their power as a public gift, and making sure that they can maintain and expand their power. And these are highly protectionist devices and I don’t think… You really have to ram them down people’s throats. They don’t make any economic sense or any other sense.”

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Introducing The Global Square

The Global Square is the name of a social networking platform in development that is targeted at the Occupy and indignant movements as well as other activist groups. The developers have notched up the level of ambition quite a bit since I last blogged about it in January when the project was dubbed “a Facebook for the 99%” by the media. Now the goal seems to be to create a kind of self-sufficient “Internet within the Internet” that satisfies not only the communication needs of occupiers but also the needs related to the development and organisation of new forms of living. Most of the work done on the platform so far has been conceptual, so there’s not much to show in terms of actual implementations yet. Therefore, the developers are currently on the lookout for coders to join in the project. Here is the call-out they released a few weeks ago:

“TheGlobalSquare aims to be the first massive decentralized social network in the history of the Internet. We are aware of the difficulties we must overcome, but we believe the Internet Community has reached a point where such an initiative is possible. It is possible because we are more united; censorship and repression have created stronger bonds between those who care about freedom and the free flow of information. How can we achieve this goal?

Structure: Organizing humanity in a single collective
The Global Square is to be an easy to use social and work platform for individuals and groups. One of the main goals is that it should have very low barriers of entry for inexperienced users, making it as easy as possible for them to contribute work, interact and use the various tools at their disposal. Another goal is that the Global Square be expandable to allow global coordinated and efficient work in every system. TheGlobalSquare recognizes the principles of personal privacy as a basic right of individuals and transparency to all users as an obligation for public systems.
The Global Square is not exclusively for activists. While it will assist activists with the correct tools and virtual meeting areas, it will also be available to the global community. Although the structure is designed for organization and coordination of personal relationships, assemblies and action, the platform is also conceived for independent work systems, movements struggling for civil causes and more. As systems are added that encompass more aspects of daily life and political topics of wide interest, experts and users from all walks of life will be able to use the Global Square to discuss, create and learn. A first example of this is the News Commons, which will be a source of verified, crowd sourced and peer reviewed news on all topics. Other early basic systems to be created on the Global Square are the Global Market for establishing new methods of exchange and the Renaissance and Evolution Forums for testing principles for governance and law. Future systems could include topics such as communications, healing, food, arts, sports, sciences, trade, housing, and energy.
This is an open community where everyone is welcome. It is peer-to-peer, horizontal and non-hierarchical. This is a space where coders, designers, itechs, artists, activists and philosophers are invited to collaborate together. We believe it is necessary to concentrate and focus our energy, so if you are already in a group planning something similar or with the same objectives please participate to enrich both projects.

P2P based
With the support of Delft University of Technology, TheGlobalSquare will mainly be developed based on the existing peer to peer technology provided by the renowned file sharing software Tribler. Tribler is a project focused on decentralized social networks with years of expertise in peer-to-peer communication. By using this particular existing P2P technology it becomes virtually impossible to break or censor our network. The content files are not centralized in any physical server, so the network belongs to its users – a basic principle of participatory democracy applied to the on-line space. It encourages input from users from countries with censorship and blocking; with an ‘unblockable’ space to share all kinds of information and work collaboratively. It has been proven that WEB, as we know it, each day is more closed and subject to arbitrary and illegal blocking. A step beyond it is more than needed.

Open system
TheGlobalSquare will include authentication mechanisms, relational schema and communication protocols. Authentication and communications are up to whoever implements this specification to build a system. That will allow a project to be “TheGlobalSquare compatible” while supporting semantic data, currently visualized as RDF. The RDF vocabularies we develop to represent meaning and relationship are the common thread that enable uniting a variety of platforms. Any network is the sum of the technology supporting it as well as the actual connections made between individuals and groups within it. To succeed, we must be able to both leverage whatever currently exists as well as develop anything needed to build bridges between systems and people. There will be a blend of network protocols, web services, data stores, P2P clients etc. Tools for people across the planet to meet, share ideas and develop proposals must enable coordinated, effective, global action. TheGlobalSquare system will provide a unified way to manage communications between people within a radically heterogeneous vocabulary system.

Approach
Build something, get a real-world community to use it, and ask how we can improve it. Instead of detailing the design out from zero, we propose to build software and incrementally improve it. This requires a designed-for-evolution type of modern software engineering approach. Our goal is to have a functional prototype by March 2012. The Global Square will be a featured project at the Berlin Biennale from April 27, 2012 until July 1, 2012. To have something working in March, we need to be modest. We will start with a simple PC app. The first feature to create is an operational skeleton for an attack resilient social network: Users can add friends and send them messages in private. You can also leave messages on the people’s public walls. This first prototype should already have robust security and use Elyptic Key Crypto to secure all communication. Each user creates a public key upon installation. All private messages are encrypted for that person only. All friendships are initiated using spoofing-free mechanisms.

Features after the March release
Using the Agile method we will focus on one feature or module for a few weeks, conduct tests, do a release and then focus on the next feature. By releasing in a 6-8 week cycle we can focus on coding and improvement. A goal is to have a smartphone app later in the year plus a standalone app with a usable GUI. We will start with the stand alone PC app, which later can be turned into an .apk for mobiles. Once the basic prototype is up and running, we can add features beyond social networking, for instance, Squares, Task Groups or Events with communication systems. Once that is up and running the focus could be on “distributed decision making and voting” and the various Systems such as News Commons.

The global square needs developers to turn ideas and dreams in reality!
For such an effort, we must count on the community of coders and developers. We are going to use a Tribler kernel based on Python. We urgently need the help of the community in order to implement all the features planned for The Global Square. If you have expertise in Python and P2P protocols you still have time and opportunity to join our project, a project which will hopefully change the dynamics of interaction among global society.

Various jobs require a combination of the following:

• experience witH Free Software project basic operation
• Python programming
• network protocols, UDP message transfers
• cryptography, pub/priv key management
• SQLight, performance, transactions
• epidemic gossip protocols, for global dissemination of crypted info
• self-organising network programming
• GUI in WxWindows
• Android developer, mixed .py build chain (for later smart phone .apk)

To join:

• Take a week to read the Global Square wiki and the other documents and understand the existing code.
• Possibly work for a few weeks on prototyping
• Feb – March 2012 availability
• Join the mailinglist: theglobalsquare@lists.takethesquare.net
• Introduce yourself :-)

General-contact: Pedro Noel info@theglobalsquare.org
Press Contact: Heather Marsh (spokesperson) press@theglobalsquare.org
Developers Contact: Johan Pouwelse and Ed Knutson (development coordinators) dev@theglobalsquare.org”

To elaborate on the call-out a bit, the project consists, as I understand it, of three distinct and more or less independent parts, a federated data exchange system, a p2p-network system, and an application layer that sits on the other two.

The aim of the federated data exchange system, known as the “Global Protocol”, is to define the structure of the data that is passed around in the network and the protocols that are used for accessing the data and communicating between nodes of the network. This will be done by using open standards such as XML/RDF. This will allow any existing social networking platform with an open API to plug in to the Global Square network, including Facebook and Twitter. This is really what sets The Global Square apart from other platforms, as it makes it possible to proliferate the network without forcing people to abandon their existing networks or to switch inconveniently between networks. It also makes the system more viable in the long-term as any new platforms that gain popularity in the future can be easily incorporated into the network.

The aim of the p2p-network is to distribute the data on the network across the individual nodes so that it will be extremely difficult to take down that data by a malevolent party, as it would involve essentially taking down every individual node which may be spread all across the planet. The p2p-network is based on the BitTorrent client Tribler which is being developed in the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Tribler is a fully decentralised system, meaning that it doesn’t require tracker servers to function (see a recent TorrentFreak article on Tribler here). Tribler has been in development for more than six years by a full-time team, so we’re talking about fairly mature technology here. Combined with mesh networking technology on the ground, the p2p-system makes the network highly resistant to shut down attempts by the authorities.

On top of the above systems come the actual applications that the users of the network will be interfacing with. Currently planned applications include a newswire, discussion forums and a global marketplace. Applications that facilitate decision making at the local occupations will likely be considered as well. And, this being open technology, anyone can develop the applications that they need.

Further details and developer information can be found in the Global Square wiki:
http://wiki.theglobalsquare.org

There’s also a discussion forum for developers and other interested parties:
http://forum.theglobalsquare.org

For those who want to plunge straight into the actual code, here are the repos related to the p2p-system:
Android app: https://github.com/whirm/tgs-android
PC app: https://github.com/whirm/tgs-pc
Dispersy (distributed permission system) protocol: https://github.com/whirm/dispersy

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On filesharing and anonymity

TorrentFreak has published an article on the rising popularity of anonymised and secure filesharing tools:

“The file-sharing landscape is slowly adjusting in response to the continued push for more anti-piracy tools, the final Pirate Bay verdict, and the raids and arrests in the Megaupload case. Faced with uncertainty and drastic changes at file-sharing sites, many users are searching for secure, private and uncensored file-sharing clients. Despite the image its name suggests, RetroShare is one such future-proof client.

The avalanche of negative file-sharing news over the past weeks hasn’t gone unnoticed to users and site operators.

From SOPA to Megaupload, there is a growing uncertainly about the future of sharing.

While many BitTorrent sites and cyberlockers continue to operate as usual, there is a growing group of users who are expanding their horizons to see what other means of sharing are available if the worst case scenario becomes reality.

Anonymous, decentralized and uncensored are the key and most sought-after features. For some this means signing up with a VPN to make their BitTorrent sharing more private, but new clients are also generating interest.

Earlier this month we wrote about Tribler, a decentralized (not anonymous) BitTorrent client that makes torrent sites obsolete. We’ve covered Tribler for more than half a decade, but it was only after our most recent post that it really took off with more than a hundred thousand downloads in a few days.

But there are more file-sharing tools that are specifically built to withstand outside attacks. Some even add anonymity into the mix. RetroShare is such a private and uncensored file-sharing client, and the developers have also noticed a significant boom in users recently.

The RetroShare network allows people to create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by outsiders.

RetroShare founder DrBob told us that while the software has been around since 2006, all of a sudden there’s been a surge in downloads. “The interest in RetroShare has massively shot up over the last two months,” he said.

“In January our downloads tripled when interest in SOPA was at its peak. It more than doubled again in February, when cyberlockers disabled sharing or shut down entirely. At the moment we are getting 10 times more downloads than in December 2011.”

RetroShare’s founder believes that there is an increased need for security, privacy and freedom among file-sharers, features that are at the core of his application.

“RetroShare is about creating a private space on the Internet. A social collaboration network where you can share anything you want. A space that is free from the prying eyes of governments, corporations and advertisers. This is vitally important as our freedom on the Internet is under increasing threat,” DrBob told TorrentFreak.

“RetroShare is free from censorship: like Facebook banning ‘obscene’ breast-feeding photographs. A network that allows you to use any pseudonym, without insisting on knowing your real name. A network where you will not face the threat of jail, or being banned from entry into a country for an innocent tweet.”

It’s impossible to accurately predict what file-sharing will look like 5 years from now. But, a safe assumption is that anonymity will play a more central role than it ever has.

Recent crackdowns have made operators of central file-sharing sites and services more cautious of copyright infringement. Some even went as far as shutting down voluntarily, like BTjunkie.

In the long run this might drive more casual downloaders to legitimate alternatives, if these are available. Those who keep on sharing could move to smaller communities, darknets, and anonymous connections.”

While it’s naturally a good thing that awareness of the security issues with filesharing is growing, some thought should also be given to the openness question as well. If a large portion of sharing activity moves to darknets, we risk losing the network effect that has made the filesharing community the significant power it now is. What we need are technologies that will provide enough anonymity whilst also making the maximum amount of content available to the maximum amount of people, and we need these technologies to become the standard fairly quickly before the copyright industry manages to scare away the casual users from the networks. Filesharing should be preserved as a core online activity for the majority of Internet users, not just the selected few who understand the technical issues. To allow filesharing to drift back into the marginals would be a step backwards for our culture at large.

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