john stanton writes

"The End of Freedom"

John Stanton

“The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band, presses masses of isolated [people] together and supports them in a world which has become a wilderness for them -- and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other which prepares each individual in [their] lonely isolation against all others -- corresponds to each other and needs each other in order to keep the terror-ruled movement in motion and keep it moving. Just as terror…ruins all relationships with men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when [people] have lost contact with [other people] as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, [people] lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced [follower], but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (standards of thought) no longer exist.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The American nation-state led by the Bush Administration, and the transnational rebel group led by Bin Laden, has brought to life the artificially fabricated insanity that Hannah Arendt so dreaded. But the situation is far worse than she could have imagined. The insanity that permeates the psyche of the United States of America and the mysterious Al Qaeda is being carefully nurtured by Bush and Bin Laden, the products of wealthy families intertwined in business dealings for decades. Rather than trying to find a mid-point where some commonality and reduction of violence might be found, these two zealots and their minions have eliminated the possibility of any peaceful outcome and, instead, daily sow the seeds of destruction for the causes they claim to promote. In short, perpetual ideological conflict played out on the battlefields of the world.

hydrarchist writes:

"Economic Orthodoxy and the Information Commons:
An
Interview With Michael Perelman"

Frederick Emrich, www.info-commons.org

Economics is a social science concerned with the production,
distribution, and consumption of resources to the fulfillment of human
desires. In some estimations, economics is the most "scientific"
of the social sciences because it has constructed powerful analytical
models and tools for developing our understanding of these processes.
Economics -- or at least the appeal to the idea of economics -- plays
an important role in policymaking. This is true not only of policymaking
with respect to physical goods, but also with respect to information.

Developing a full understanding of the information commons
means understanding: how information can be seen as a distinctive resource
(or set of resources); how informational resources are produced, consumed,
and distributed; how the accessibility of information is an essential
factor in its utility; and how policymaking can help to build or to
destroy a vibrant information economy. In short, understanding the information
commons requires that we understand the information economy, in the
broadest sense of that term.

Michael Perelman is Professor of Economics at California
State University at Chico. He has spent a significant amount of energy
addressing economic issues related to information. Although he is a
professor of economics, although he teaches courses in a university
economics department, and although he holds a doctorate in economics
from a major U.S. university, Perelman has called himself a "lapsed
economist" because he questions the validity of much of what passes
for "economic orthodoxy." His most recent book, Steal This
Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of
Creativity (Palgrave 2002), focuses on the destructive influence
of strong intellectual property rights in the areas of science and technology.

As part of a continuing project to build an understanding
of the information economy, info-commons.org editor Frederick Emrich
recently conducted this interview with Perelman.

hydrarchist writes

Software (,) Politics and Indymedia
Benjamin Mako Hill mako@debian.org

Introduction and History
In addition to many other milestones in the activist and
anti-globalization communities, the 1999 meeting of the
WTO in Seattle marked the birth of the
Independent Media Center, also known as Indymedia. Within a year,
Indymedia had exploded in size. With slogans like "Be your
own media" and a grass-roots publishing structure to back
them up, Indymedia's attempt to provide a non-corporate and more
democratic alternative to mainstream media struck a chord that
resonated with activist communities across the globe.

For the first year, Indymedia's face on the web was
Active, a web application written by a group
of Australian hackers for the purpose of facilitating independent
media. However, Active was unable to keep up
with the IMC's tremendous growth in size and political diversity.
There were more people interested in reading Indymedia and
interacting on the IMC websites than there was bandwidth and
computer power to support them. Users and media activists demanded
performance, internationalization, flexibility, and features;
Active and its developers were unable to
cater to all of these needs.

"Raging Against the Machine"

Theodore Roszak, L.A. Times

[Theodore Roszak is professor emeritus of history at California State University, Hayward. His books include "The Making of a Counter Culture" and "The Cult of Information."]

In its '1984' commercial, Apple suggested that its computers would smash Big Brother. But technology gave him more control.