Panarchy.com

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak, hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.

Download PDF:
"Future of Making" Map [SR-1154] http://www.iftf.org/system/files/deliverables/SR-1154+TH+2008+Maker+Map....

IFTF Post:
http://iftf.org/node/1766

Situated Technologies Pamphlets 1: Urban Computing and its Discontents

by
Adam Greenfield
Mark Shepard

The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How is our experience of the city and the choices we make in it affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics, and other “situated” technologies? How will the ability to design increasingly responsive environments alter the way architects conceive of space? What do architects need to know about urban computing and what do technologists need to know about cities? Situated Technologies Pamphlets will be published in nine issues and will be edited by a rotating list of leading researchers and practitioners from architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, and engineering.

free download @ http://www.lulu.com/content/1554599

Alex Steffen has a great post over at http://www.worldchanging.org on "Neighborliness, Innovation and Sustainability." He makes such an important point that it is worth quoting at length:

I call this idea "the Swap." It's sort of a middle stage on the road to a better future, where people have accepted that something must change, but have not really gotten their heads around the idea that everything must change. Therefore, the Swap is a form of denial.

Michel Bauwens definitely has a way with words, and from time to time you find pieces like this one in which he summarizes a number of salient theoretical insights into peer-to-peer society (network culture):

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/interview-on-peer-to-peer-politics-with-co...

An excellent post from the ever-thoughtful Bill Tozier revolving around the point that "there can be no selective archive":

Somehow the myths of The Book, of The Editor, the Archive, and even the Authoritative Word, they’ve eaten our ability to hold flexible and contingent opinions. So few of us wonder which book we have in our hands; which edition, which version, which printing, which copy?

http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2008/04/06/why-i-feel-so-strongly-about-...

Well I've started working on my Ph.D. exam, targeted for some time over the summer. My topic is something I'm calling "differencing" which is a distinction-making process.

Basically, any act of making a distinction, such as drawing a circle, creates an inside and an outside at the same moment. Inside, outside, and the distinction itself, are all mutually constituted.

As near as I can figure, differencing must involve three separate processes:

• emergence
• autopoiesis
• integration

Colleague, researcher, and great guy Tere Vadén (with Juha Suoranta) have new work available:

WIKIWORLD
Political Economy and the Promise of Participatory Media

Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén
University of Tampere, Finland

Recently, I absorbed Arjun Appadurai's little book "Fear of Small Numbers" (http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3863-7) which he frames as a deliberate contrast to the "Huntington model" from Clash of Civilizations.

There are some good concepts in here:

1. The notion of "predatory identities" which is to say identities that cannot exist without eliminating other identities. I would extend this concept to "parasitic identities" as well, with obvious implications.

2. The idea that the respect of minority groups in liberalism has always been tied to the fear of "dissent" and not the respect for difference.

3. The need for a shift in thinking from the "clash of civilizations" (Huntington) to a "civilization of clashes." I think this has important and useful implications related to agonism in general.

It dovetails nicely with Laclau and Mouffe's articulations in "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy," as well as Hardt and Negri's "Multitude."

It's pretty clear he's talking about panarchy:

"The new transnational activisms... build their actual solidarities in a more ad hoc, inductive and context-sensitive manner.... coordinating without massive centralization, reproducing without a clear-cut mandate, working occasionally in the larger public eye but often outside it, leveraging resources from state and market to their own ends, and pursuing visions of equity an daccess that do not fit many twentieth century models either of development or of democracy." (p136-7)

Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Extortion through Systems Disruption

Novelty and collective attention

Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman

The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.

Novelty and collective attention -- Wu and Huberman 104 (45): 17599 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences