The internet and politics

[noblesavage]

Ok, for the last few days I've been kind of in a daze trying to process the ass rapping the USA is taking from the neocons. I've heard everyone calling for a revolution and or fleeing the country. Leaving the country is an easy option for me as I have dual citizenship (US and Brittan.) I'm going to keep that option open, but in the mean time I'm not done fighting. Now is the time to hold our ground. The Democrats may have lost the election, but I don’t think rational thought lost. Remember the other half of the voters who did get it. Basically, I think the American voters were scared, pumped full of fear, and confused; because of this cognitive dissonance a disproportionate number of them chose the comfort of religion and patriotic symbolism rather than uncomfortable truth. The truth will become evident. And we need to make sure it does.

The election, for me, highlighted religious stupidity vs. rational thought. Period, end of story. That map of The United States of Canada and Jesusland says it all. I'm going to piss, and scream, and moan if the pundits try and spin it any other way. I'm sick of hearing that Democrats need to reach out to these people. Well, I for one do not want to pander to religious nutjobs. That is where I draw the line.

Talk of violent armed revolution is not a realistic option and I personally don’t like violence. So, what to do?

We need to think long term. We need an infidel Karl Rove. We need strategy. We need to Outfox Fox. There is only one way, in my mind, and that is with the internet. Ok, in my next post I'll try and give little pieces of what at some point may turn into an essay or blueprint of sorts.

[LadyShea]

On an II thread, we were discussing ways to act. I think we need to concentrate on the left as a whole, not necessarily just non-theists, though they should definitlely be included. I think we separate ourselves from possible allies pretty regularly and that hurts us, because the right is unified. Liberal Christians, GLBT, Pagans, Theist Humanists/Quakers, should ALL pull together.

One idea I liked was an ad campaign mentioned by ksagnostic, where the ad (could be print or video) would describe or outline a person who has accomplished something, or does something ANY person would consider "a good thing" then end with the words "Oh, and by the way, I am ". The fact is we are feared and viewed as aliens.

[noblesavage]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

On an II thread, we were discussing ways to act. I think we need to concentrate on the left as a whole, not necessarily just non-theists, though they should definitlely be included. I think we separate ourselves from possible allies pretty regularly and that hurts us, because the right is unified. Liberal Christians, GLBT, Pagans, Theist Humanists/Quakers, should ALL pull together.

True. And it doesn't help that the necons have hijacked the language. "Death Tax", "Flip-Floper", "Family Values", "Oportunity", "Terrorist", "Partial Birth Abortion", etc. This is the front we need to win, no?

One idea I liked was an ad campaign mentioned by ksagnostic, where the ad (could be print or video) would describe or outline a person who has accomplished something, or does something ANY person would consider "a good thing" then end with the words "Oh, and by the way, I am <an atheist/agnostic/Humanist/gay/Liberal/Muslim/Pagan>". The fact is we are feared and viewed as aliens.

Yep, that is a perfect idea. But I don't just want to move the goal post. I want to change the damn game. I want the fundys to show up dressed in football gear only to find that the game has changed to water polo.

This is a thread I wrote which touches on what I'm getting at:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=85304

Ok, I've got pizza comming, I'll be back in a bit.

[beyelzu]

I believe we should start a firebombing campaign of fundy churches and claim acts of no gods


just kidding.



I really like the idea by ksagnostic

[LadyShea]

Well, I think Howard Dean showed that using the Internet for campaigning was viable and surprised everyone.

We all know the power of the Interenet.

BUT

A much larger percentage of people (mostly older conservatives) than you might believe, are not Internet users. Some fundies I know think the 'net is flat out a tool of Satan.

Are you planning on targeting the Right directly, or indirectly through the more savvy 'Netizens?

[noblesavage]

Ok, I've got this book called something like the Top 100 philosophers or leading thinkers or some such. It's organized historically. It starts with the pre-Socratics and proceeds to lay out mind numbing outline of Philosophy 101. Near the end of the book they start naming people that you wouldn't normally think of as philosophers, rather people whose thoughts or ideas shape generations to come. Names like Einstein, Darwin, Chomsky, etc.

Now this is where I get nutty. I think at some point they will add Richard Stallman to this list. With one simple idea, the GPL, he completely sparked a global revolution that is still in the making. If you haven't yet read it, do so, or at least read the prolog: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
The GPL has fractured into thousands of other "open source" license schemes. The "Open Source" label was created as better marketing by Eric Raymond and his crew. FYI, Stallman is an atheist. The idea has moved to other forms of content with the Creative Commons licenses. What Stallman has done is use software and law as a political tool. Political Scientists and economists are just starting to take a look at the phenomena. What they are saying is that it is more than just software. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WEBSUC.html


When I started thinking about IP law and writing an article I initiated an email dialog with Stallman. At one point, this is what he wrote, and it really made me think:

I urge you not to use the term "IP law" in your articles. Here's a draft article (any comments?) explaining why:


It has become fashionable to describe copyright, patents, and trademarks as "intellectual property". This fashion did not occur by accident, and independent thinkers would do well to resist it.

One reason is a bias that is not hard to see: the term suggests thinking about copyright, patents, trademarks, etc., by analogy with property rights for physical objects. (This analogy is at odds with the legal philosophies of copyright law, of patent law, and of trademark law, but only specialists know that.) These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, so use of this term encourages changing them to be more so. Since that change would benefit the companies that excercize copyright, patent and trademark powers, these companies find the term useful, and their efforts have made it fashionable.

According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of <em>Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property</em> by James Boyle.) WIPO mainly represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks.

Those who would prefer to judge issues of copyright policy, issues of patent policy, and these other issues, each on its own merits would do well to reject such a biased term. Many have asked me to propose some other name for the category. One proposal is "IMPs", which could stand for Imposed Monopoly Privileges; another is "GOLEMs", which could stand for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. But I think we should not replace "intellectual property" with some other term. An alternate term could eliminate the bias, but won't address the term's deeper problem: overgeneralization.

The term "intellectual property" operates as a catch-all to lump together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which really have very little in common. (Thus, if you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.) These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues.

I regularly find that even experts on patent law, copyright law, and trademark law are regularly led by the term "intellectual property" into making generalizations that they should have recognized as false. I have not kept a list, but I will be watching for examples at this meeting.

The term "intellectual property" thus conduces to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common form of these disparate laws, which is that they are monopolies that can be enforced, bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the various restrictions they place on the public, and the consequences that result.

At such a broad scale, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about "intellectual property" is almost surely foolish. Whoever tries to consider "the intellectual property issue" has already been led astray by the supposition that these subjects form one unified issue, and will tend to envision only opinions that are broad and simplistic.

If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws say, the first step is to forget that you ever heard them grouped together as "intellectual property" and treat them as separate subjects. To give the public clear information and encourage clear thinking, we should reject the idea that there is an "intellectual property debate", and instead discuss the specific issues of copyright, or the issues of patents, or the issues of trademarks--issues specific enough to make sense.

And when we talk about reforming WIPO, among other things we should change its name.

[noblesavage]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

A much larger percentage of people (mostly older conservatives) than you might believe, are not Internet users. Some fundies I know think the 'net is flat out a tool of Satan.

I'm sure they felt the same way about TV when it first came out, now they are brainwashed by Fox. If you haven't seen Outfoxed: Murdock's war on Journalism. I recommend it. If anyone want's a copy, send me a pm.

I'm going to quote a from John Lock (The net guy, not the political theorist), who swings between brilliance and insanity:

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.


Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

Those of us that hang out on discussion boards know this. Real information is like crack. Once you get used to it, you can't stand broadcast.

Are you planning on targeting the Right directly, or indirectly through the more savvy 'Netizens?

I don't know, I never proposed that I be the leader... I'm just thinking shit up.

[Godless Dave]

Originally Posted by noblesavage

I'm sick of hearing that Democrats need to reach out to these people.

Me too. Every time we try to reach out they ignore us or spit in our faces. Remember, they see compromise as weakness.

I think part of the problem is that for the last four years, including the Kerry campaign, Democrats were too conciliatory and not attacking enough. Remember how effectively Clinton was demonized over issues that were almost entirely not true? We had real ammunition to use against Bush, we could have pushed the "Bush is a liar" meme much, much more, but some elements were afraid that by coming across as angry we would alienate voters.

On Tuesday we saw what playing nice got us.

[noblesavage]

Try thinking of it this way. FOSS (Free and Open Source) Licenses are like little constitutions that define communities and a market. They lay out the rules for participation in the community.

I know Chomsky and the folks over a Zmag talk about alternative economic systems. I haven't dug too much into this. The thing is, I don't think they have ever actually created a working one, have they? The Free Software hackers have. Look at what's happening in Brazil: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1...inux.html?pg=2 I can find hundreds of other examples. How all this will play out in various business models, non-profits, and alliances is still being worked out. It's going to take a lot of trial and error. But we are getting a good idea of what works and what doesn't. I'll speculate on various places this could go later. But for now understand that mass culture rose with mass media. Mass media is cracking. If you want to see hard data on this read:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

An analysis of the sales data and trends from these services and others like them shows that the emerging digital entertainment economy is going to be radically different from today's mass market. If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.

Mass media is going to split and splinter like religion did during the protestant reformation. We need to be asking where are the cracks, how can we exploit them? Those of us that were on Slashdot back when the Federal Court decided to shut down Napster just giggled. We knew they were getting ready to take off only the first head of a thousand-headed hydra. As soon as they killed Napster up like daises popped: Kazzaa, Morpheous, Edonkey, GNUtilla, DC++, Waste, Bittorrent, and countless others.

We have to think in terms of networks, not command and control economies. We don’t want top down organization. We need to think like slime mold. How do we create self replicating, self sustaining, communities that can code the values of rational thought into a most basic fundamental unit?

When does a social movement become a religion? How do you prevent your movement from becoming twisted, distorted, and turned into a religion? How do you code this into the value system? Didn't the Native Americans have a Clown or Joker built into their mythology that says, "Don't take this shit literally? Don’t let the message of the metaphor get stuck to the metaphor!!! That is where the major monotheistic religions fucked up, IMHO. This is, I'm guessing, why Raymond and Stallman use the hacker label. They are just tossing around a little cognitive dissonance. The more artistic in the community, like Gibson who defined the term "cyber space", and Neil Stephenson who is just a fucking genius, have created a "cyber punk/hacker" mythos.

I feel like the old guard has given us all these tools and nuggets of wisdom, but they are getting old and repeating the same old shit. It's time for the next generation to pick up where they left off.

During the last renaissance we got secular ideas, followed by secular governments, and democracy. But as Chomsky says, "Democracy is a necessary Illusion. In a dictatorship you use force to control the populace, with democracy you just brainwash people." And Chomsky is analyzing the traditional top down media structure. So what's next? What do we want to accomplish with the digital renaissance? If we can knock out two legs of the power structure, mass media and mass culture, maybe it will just topple on its own weight.

[noblesavage]

Ok, I hear we have a brilliant biologist who frequents these parts. Perhaps she can explain slime mold to all of us.

[Lauri D]

Yes, I want to hear about slime mold.

[Roland98]

Aw, ye gods.

Slime molds are basically multicellular organisms formed from the swarming together and combination of a number of single celled organisms. When the conditions are favorable, the new multicellular organism can release spores to send more single-celled organisms off into the environment, and start the whole process over again. It's basically a situation where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; all the single cells come together and work cooperatively to form an organism that's more than just a bunch of individual cells stuck together; it's a new entity. A biofilm might also be an apt example, but not quite as poetic as "slime mold."

[noblesavage]

Ok, I would like to declare this the Slime Mold Strategy (SMS). The rest is all a matter of details.

[noblesavage]

Ok, I guess to summarize all of this, the revolution that we all want is already going on; we just need to get with the program.

No, I'm not a penguin hugging idealist that thinks Linux is going to save the world. What I'm saying is, we need to look at what the Free (Free as in Freedom not Beer) software guys have been doing and ask ourselves some serious question:

1) How and why is it working?

2) How can their strategy be applied to our goals as "Free Thinkers".

3) We don't want to use the labels, words, and symbols associated with software: "Free" and "Open Source". "Creative Commons" is getting warmer, but we have to have our own message crafted in such a manner. What will it be?

4) How do we present our values in a way that communicates on numerous levels while framing the issues in our favor? (Think symbolism)

[Adora]

5) How much is this going to cost?

The reason the current party won is because it has more money backed into it through business and the upper class of the US that it then funds into manipulating the rest of the voters (ie- the crazy religious nutsjobs). This, unfortunately, will always be the downfall of the left. Left Ethics don't fit well into a capitalist system, and therefore tend to limit the amount of cash able to be generated for causes.

[noblesavage]

Originally Posted by Adora

5) How much is this going to cost?

That's a good question. Thanks for asking.

The reason the current party won is because it has more money backed into it through business and the upper class of the US that it then funds into manipulating the rest of the voters (ie- the crazy religious nutsjobs). This, unfortunately, will always be the downfall of the left. Left Ethics don't fit well into a capitalist system, and therefore tend to limit the amount of cash able to be generated for causes.

That is the entire point! Linux is fighting the likes of MS and winning on a lot of fronts. There is this Browser out that everyone is talking about called Firefox which has got all the Tech Journalists saying that the browsers wars are back on. Tell me in MBA terms how their key developer, who is not very old, and with little money, can challenge the likes of MS?

Look, it's a wired world when the Beastie Boys have a pro-choice song out, that indirectly references Richard Stallman, and is released and licensed under the Creative Commons.

[Cool Hand]

Originally Posted by Adora

5) How much is this going to cost?

The reason the current party won is because it has more money backed into it through business and the upper class of the US that it then funds into manipulating the rest of the voters (ie- the crazy religious nutsjobs). This, unfortunately, will always be the downfall of the left. Left Ethics don't fit well into a capitalist system, and therefore tend to limit the amount of cash able to be generated for causes.

Sounds great in principle. It's not borne out by the facts, however.

The fact is that as of October 13, 2004, the Democratic National Committee had raised about $299 million in campaign contributions and the Republican National Committe had raised about $330 million. Yes, the RNC did outperform the DNC in contributions, but only by about 10%, not an overwhelming margin.

New York Times Article

There are plenty of large industries, organizations, and rich persons who support Democratic politics. It's not an accurate portral of the reality of it to suggest that Democrats don't thrive well in a capitalist, free market society. If they didn't we wouldn't see many of them in office.

Cool Hand

[noblesavage]

I just stumbled upon this article in the Nation The Rise of Open-Source Politics .

There is also a discussion going on at Slashdot...

[Roland98]

You can join us here to put our collective heads together and brainstorm for a bit.

[-FX-]

Originally Posted by Adora

5) How much is this going to cost?

The reason the current party won is because it has more money backed into it through business and the upper class of the US that it then funds into manipulating the rest of the voters (ie- the crazy religious nutsjobs). This, unfortunately, will always be the downfall of the left. Left Ethics don't fit well into a capitalist system, and therefore tend to limit the amount of cash able to be generated for causes.

My how things have changed