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'. We will particularly use this section to monitor Civic Hacking projects.

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

Key article: Alex Steffen: Optimism as a Political Act

Introductory Articles

Important Policy statement: Five Principles of Openness and Transparency in Politics

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
  3. Characteristics of Effective Activism
  4. Anonymous Blogging Guide: A step-by-step way to protecting your privacy and your safety
  5. Blog for a Cause: How to use blogs as advocacy tools for political and social change

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

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

- Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy


The Constellation Method of Social Change

In spite of current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what's possible.

- Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Freize [3]


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 [4])


Pessimism is a luxury we can only afford in good times

1.

"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 [5] )


2. Against the production of hopelessness

"Hopelessness isn't natural. It needs to be produced... the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives, that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win... Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it's dragging the entire capitalist system down with it."

- David Graeber [6]

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 [7]


The New Power of Internet-organized Minorities

"The adage that organized minorities are more powerful than disorganized majorities is now more true than ever. However, as these organized minorities multiply and grow, they are challenging the very nature of what power is and how it will be maintained in our society. ... Self-organizing groups, and networks that tie these groups into powerful coalitions, are the new players. To alter Time magazine’s formulation, the Person of the Year isn’t “you,” it’s “us.”

- Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry [8]


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 [9]


It takes a long time for change to happen quickly.

- Jon Husband, Wirearchy.com

Resources

Key Blogs

  1. DigiActive: blog monitoring digital activism
  2. Digital Resistance research is monitored via the iRevolution blog

Key Books

  1. Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody: On the political implications of the hacker and free software movements:
  2. Jeffrey Juris. Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Duke University Press, 2008 [10]
  3. Johan Soderbergh: Hacking Capitalism
  4. Decoding Liberation
  5. Christopher Kely. Two Bits, on the strategy of Recursive Publics
  6. 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

Key Podcasts/Webcasts

  1. Alain Badiou on the Politics of Resistance
  2. Andrew Rasiej on how Social Media are Transforming Democracy
  3. Barak Obama on the Use of Social Media in his Electoral Campaign
  4. Ben Rahn on Online Political Fundraising
  5. Bill Allison and Greg Elin on Open Government Initiatives
  6. Bruce Bimber on the Internet in U.S. Elections
  7. Bruce Sterling on the Estonian Cyberwar
  8. Christopher Kelty on Free Software as Culture
  9. Clay Shirky on Collective Action through Social Networking
  10. Clay Shirky on Self-organized Online Cause Groups
  11. Clay Shirky on Social Networks and Politics
  12. Clay Shirky on Social Networks and the Obama Campaign
  13. Danielle Allen on the Archeology of Internet Rumours
  14. David Sirota on the Populist Uprising in the US
  15. David Smith on a Meaningful Life Being of Use
  16. David Taylor on Radical Web Designs for Social Activism
  17. David Weinberger on Blogs and U.S. Politics
  18. David Weinberger on the Web 2.0 for Politics
  19. Eben Moglen on Free Culture after the Dotcommunist Manifesto
  20. Eben Moglen on Social Change without Coercion
  21. Eben Moglen on Universal Access to Knowledge
  22. Elisabeth and John Edwards on the Impact of the Internet on US Politics
  23. Ellen Miller on the Sunlight Foundation and Transparency in the Political Process
  24. Greg Elin on Open Data from the US Government
  25. Harald Katzmair on Developing and Implementing Social Network Campaign Strategies
  26. Heather Holdridge on Civic Online Campaigns
  27. Henry Jenkins on the Role of Civic Media in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
  28. Howard Rheingold on Smart Mobs for Democracy
  29. Howard Rheingold on the Smart Mobs in Korea
  30. Jascha Franklin-Hodge on How Obama Really Did It
  31. Jeffrey Juris on Networking Futures
  32. Joe Trippi on Obama as Internet President
  33. Jon Warnow on Open Source Activism
  34. Jonathan Cabiria on Virtual Environments for Social Justice
  35. Jonathan Zittrain on The Future of the Internet and Civic Technologies
  36. Judith Donath on Designing Society
  37. Justin Oberman on Advocacy in the Mobile Age
  38. Karl Palmås on Panspectrocism
  39. Katrin Verclas on Using Mobile Phones for Social Change
  40. Lani Guinier on Experiments in Democracy
  41. Lawrence Lessig on Coding against Policy Corruption
  42. Lawrence Lessig on how Free Culture Needs Free Software
  43. Lawrence Lessig on the Need for Open Politics
  44. Lawrence Lessig on using Openness against the Corruption of Politics
  45. Liam Kirschner on Brilliant Swarms for Personal Transformation and Political Activism
  46. Luis Ramirez and Paloma Baytelman on the Chilean Penguin Revolution
  47. Mark Elliot on the Participatory Consultation Process for the Future of Melbourne
  48. Mark Elliott on Stigmergy, Collaboration and Citizen Wikis
  49. Mark Pesce on Hyperpolitics
  50. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga on his experience with Daily Kos
  51. Marty Kearns on Netcentric Advocacy in a Socially Networked World
  52. Matt Bai on the Web and the Next U.S. President
  53. Michael Anti on how Blogging has changed China
  54. Michael Nagler on Nonviolence
  55. Michel Bauwens on the Peer to Peer Society
  56. Michel Bauwens on the Political and Policy Aspects of P2P
  57. Nicco Mele on the Impact of Web 2.0 on Politics
  58. Paul Selker on the Obama Works Experience
  59. Pete Ashdown on Open Source Politics
  60. Ricken Patel on Trends in Global e-Advocacy
  61. Robert Fuller on Rankism
  62. Robert Hackett on Networked Advocacy
  63. Steven Lenos on e-Participation for Governments and Parliaments
  64. Todd Main on Effective Lobbying For Open Source
  65. Tom Steinberg on Innovations in Online Activism at the MySociety Project

Key Resources

  1. Top 10 Social Action Platforms for 2008: also a list of runner's up
  2. Steven Clift monitors e-democracy initiatives, at http://www.publicus.net/e-government/
  3. 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
  4. An initiative by R.U. Sirius et al. to define the ideal Open Source Political Toolkit
  5. Some tools for activists: Frontline SMS; Martus
  6. The following sites and resources are “insanely useful Web sites” for government transparency in the USA.
  7. Metagovernment keeps a list of Mixdemocracy projects, with combine elements of direct and representative democracy with the help of new technology at http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Related_projects
  8. A Global Map of Alternative Media, compiled by the Alternative Media Global Project
  9. Top 100 Networks for People Who Want to Change the World


Key Tags

Recommended Friendfeed Room: Peer-to-Peer Social Change

  1. P2P Governance [11]
  2. P2P Politics [12]
  3. P2P Activism [13]
  4. P2P Political Theory [14]
  5. P2P Warfare [15]
  6. Alterglobalization Movement [16]
  7. Internet Governance [17]


Recommended P2P Wiki Articles

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

Recommended Thematic Issues of P2P News


Selected Wikipedia Articles

Pages in category "Politics"

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

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