Archive for January, 2011|Monthly archive page
The number of schools….
Cool, in watching online the CBS 60 minutes interview of Assange, I learned that he went to 37 different schools. (Not sure if that includes colleges/unis). That trumps my number: 22 (or 23) not counting college, grad school. And he seemed to have had an even more itinerant upbringing than we did….
The Haves and the Have-Nots – NYTimes.com
The Haves and the Have-Nots – NYTimes.com.
It’s easy to forget, at least for those coming from rich locations, just how much wealth is required to enable something like open source development, at least that using the Internet and ICT. It’s a little counter-intuitive: community, the commons, all these things that characterise open source work, ought not to require wealth. But they do. One needs the infrastructure for it, for starters, even if that infrastructure does not copy the 20th century West’s. One needs, more importantly, the temporal luxury of being able to say, I shall work on this, not that; I shall choose not be chosen. And that kind of wealth is huge and nearly invisible–unless one is a political or social minority, where the wealth of saying, I choose, is ever present.
Egypt Leaves the Internet – Renesys Blog
Egypt Leaves the Internet – Renesys Blog.
This is extraordinary. “Interdiction” takes on a new meaning? No: just the old meaning applied to new media. Which suggests that to have old freedoms writ into new modalities we need new protections. For this sort of interdiction–sudden, as here, but also it could be progressive, so that one doesn’t really know it’s occurring until too late, it’s occurred and there’s nothing to do because there is no way to discriminate one from the other–this sort of clamp down could occur, does occur, will occur everywhere.
Microcredit: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Microcredit: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
A fairly decent article… and it naturally–this is after all, Korten writing–raises the issue of what counts, what makes up a community. Local communities are geographically determined; but must all communities then be of that shape? Obviously, I think not. But then what configures a non-local community? What orders it, enables determines it and its boundaries and striations?
Ford warns of TTC fare hike; budget reveals minor cuts – thestar.com
Ford warns of TTC fare hike; budget reveals minor cuts – thestar.com.
It’s always depressing–really depressing–to read of such patent hypocrisy from the Tories and right-wing, in general. Harper’s desire for more prison expansion is another case in point. Government, the logic goes, is always bad, except when it builds prisons, which instance right-wing social ideals but do worse than zero for actual crime and even less to counter social injustices. Government money is bad otherwise–sigh.
Meanwhile, our tax dollars are spent in obscure ways to produce negative effects and to counter social justice, and our tax dollars–mine, say–are spent on things which are worse than costly: they lock in a system that will continue the social injustices and opacity.
newspeak 