Category:Politics

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Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.

- Ryunosuke Satoro [1]


Introduction

This page is for political and activist practices and processes that are somehow influenced by the peer to peer dynamic. See also the related page on P2P Governance Concepts, which deals with 'how we manage peer to peer processes'.

Not all concepts from the Encyclopedia have been ported to this page yet: only the terms from A-D (first two columns).

Here is a Podcast on the political aspects of P2P.

The P2P Foundation supports an emerging Coalition of the Commons


Introductory Articles

My own articles are listed here at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Bauwens-Articles

  1. Changing Self, Community, and Society, by Inspector Lohman #[2]
  2. Openness is not sufficient for Democracy. Bill Thompson.
  3. Towards planetary, peer to peer, and green consciousness. Dale Carrico.
  4. The Networked Public Sphere: updating Habermas
  5. A Cluetrain Manifesto for People-Powered Politics: the 95 theses reworked for politics
  6. Stephen Downes: Values for the left in an age of distribution
  7. Social Network Sites for change: overview
  8. Cass Sunstein: Is the Internet a blessing for democracy?


How To

  1. How to organize an activist campaign via Facebook, by DigiActive
  2. Ten online practical steps recommended to governments in support of democracy. Steven Clift

P2P Foundation

Blog entries at the P2P Foundation: please check the blog archive, for entries on the political aspects of P2P.

Here's a selection of a few articles:

  1. Four levels of P2P: the influence of P2P advances in stages: which ones?
  2. Peer Production and the State, and follow-up
  3. Is P2P left or right?, and follow-up

Long Citations

McKenzie Wark on expressive politics

There can be no one book, no master thinker for these times. What is called for is a practice of combining heterogeneous modes of perception, thought and feeling, different styles of researching and writing, different kinds of connection to different readers, proliferation of information across different media, all practiced within a gift economy, expressing and elaborating differences, rather than broad-casting a dogma, a slogan, a critique or line. ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ This expressive politics does not seek to overthrow the state, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence. It spreads the seeds of an alternate practice of everyday life.

-McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto


David Snowden on idealistic vs. naturalistic sense-making

"In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. … Naturalistic approaches by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.” (Kurtz and David Snowden, Bramble Bushes in the Thicket)


William James on Meliorism

"meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become" (William James. Pragmatism. Harvard UP, 1975, p. 137)

"As meliorism takes as its goal to make things better through concerted effort, meliorism is a habit of mind and a mode of practice that aims for realistic optimism rather than passivity, pessimism, or nihilism" (Peter Lunenfeld [3])


Pessimism is a luxury we can only afford in good times

"Pessimism is a luxury we can only afford in good times, in difficult times it easily represents a self-inflicted, self-fulfilling death sentence. This insight, to me, is real Realism or real Realpolitik, far from blue-eyed Idealism. We have to courageously resist the current tendency to suspect those who work for a better world to be hopeless idealists. This would mean Realpolitik letting disaster happen (by deepening fault lines instead of transcending them), and us not at least attempting to prevent this. Strange real Realpolitik!" (Evelin Lindner, 2004.)

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." (Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A personal history of our times, 2004, p. 208)

(both citations found here [4] )


Mitch Kapor on Open Politics

"the whole concept of open and equal access to information could do wonders for our politics. Placing information in the open, allowing people to debate both general and very specific aspects of software, and then creating a process for decision-making about implementation could be very important lessons.... There are many other interesting aspects to the open source community that may very well help define new participatory processes that can help us revitalize our democracy."

- Mitch Kapor [5]


Dale Carrico on an emergent technoprogressive politics

"The fact remains that there seems to me to be an exciting, vitally important emerging technoprogressive mainstream in the United States of America and across the planet knitting together what might initially have seemed to be disparate concerns into an ever more unified, ever more popular, ever more emancipatory movement, conjoining

(a) democratic and anti-authoritarian education, agitation, and organizing via peer-to-peer networked formations,

(b) research, funding, and institutionalization of decentralized and renewable energy provision,

(c) advocacy of universal informed nonduressed consensual recourse to emerging genetic and prosthetic medicines,

(d) championing universal education to promote critical, literary, scientific, and civic literacy,

(e) defending the right of women to avoid or end unwanted pregnancies as well as to make recourse to ARTs to facilitate wanted ones,

(f) circumventing technodevelopmental wealth concentration via automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing through the advocacy of a non-means-tested universal basic income guarantee,

(g) overturning militarist budgetary priorities, regulating the trade in and use of arms of all kinds, dismantling private armies and policing forces, repudiating the ongoing automation and abstraction of death-dealing, and

(h) turning the tide of confiscatory intellectual enclosure by encouraging access to free creative content through public subsidy of citizen participation in networks, universal public access requirements for research funded by the public, limiting current legal copyright terms, widening fair use provisions, radically circumscribing state, corporate, and academic practices of secrecy, and repudiating the legal fiction of corporate personhood." (http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/08/trouble-with-technocentricity.html)

Alex Foti on liberals and radicals

"A coalition of liberals and radicals is needed to defeat authoritarian nationalists and inegalitarian freemarketeers. Liberals without radicals turn into moderates, and radicals without liberals turn into fundamentalists."


Short Citations

Much of our modern thinking about rights is informed by an idea of sovereignty that emphasises autonomy rather than relatedness.

- Billy Matheson [6]


It takes a long time for change to happen quickly.

- Jon Husband, Wirearchy.com

Resources

Key Books

  1. Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

On the political implications of the hacker and free software movements:

  1. Johan Soderbergh: Hacking Capitalism
  2. Decoding Liberation
  3. Christopher Kely. Two Bits, on the strategy of Recursive Publics
  4. Abstract Activism. Otto von Busch and Karl Palmås.

Also, for academic audiences:

  1. Reformatting Politics: Information Technology and Global Civil Society. Editor: Jodi Dean, Jon W. Anderson, Geert Lovink. New York and London: Routledge, 2006
  2. The Politics of Cyberconflict. Athina Karatzogianni. New York: Routledge, 2006
  3. Information Politics on the Web. Richard Rogers. MIT Press 2004

Internal Articles

  1. Civil Constitutions
  2. Civil Societarianapproaches to politics
  3. the relational conception of the Common Good
  4. Subsidiarity


Tags

  1. P2P Governance [7]
  2. P2P Politics [8]
  3. P2P Activism [9]
  4. P2P Political Theory [10]
  5. P2P Warfare [11]
  6. Alterglobalization Movement [12]
  7. Internet Governance [13]


Thematic Issues of P2P News


Selected Wikipedia Articles

Key Resources

  1. Steven Clift monitors e-democracy initiatives, at http://www.publicus.net/e-government/
  2. A Spectrum of Politics and Governance Grounded in Empowered Citizen Dialogue and Deliberation, at http://www.communicationagents.com/tom_atlee/2005/07/04/a_spectrum_of_politics_and_governance_grounded_in_empowered_citizen_dialogue_and_deliberation.htm
  3. An initiative by R.U. Sirius et al. to define the ideal Open Source Political Toolkit
  4. Some tools for activists: Frontline SMS; Martus
  5. The following sites and resources are “insanely useful Web sites” for government transparency in the USA.

Pages in category "Politics"

The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 2,781 total.

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