Guerillartivism.net

Here is a little guide for your relatives that can help them beat censorship on the internet.

What if the networking world was really a market and not a controlled infrastructure of cohesive players?
With the recent announcements that skype wanted access to cellular networks, i was happy that someone actually raised the question finally.

Cellular networks are the worst case of proprietary control that exist. They are actually selling you a monthly subscription, most of the time with limited time, that you can't use for anything else than what it was sold for even though it could easily do more for a lot less. That's not counting the fact they often lock hardware to their own network.

Benkler's Wealth of Networks summed up something very well in this passage:

"the tension between the industrial model of cultural production and the networked information economy is nowhere more pronounced than in the question of the degree to which the new folk culture of the twenty-first century will be permitted to build upon the outputs of the twentieth-century industrial model.

In this battle, the stakes are high.

One cannot make new culture ex nihilo.

We are as we are today, as cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and stories that are heavily based on the outputs of that industrial period.

If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new platform for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, paste, and remix present culture.

And it is precisely this freedom that most directly challenges the laws written for the twentieth-century technology, economy, and cultural practice."

Here is an interesting podcast from the EFF's founders:

"John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore were welcomed by Cory Doctorow, the U.S. - Canada Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy, for a discussion and q&a regarding their careers as cyberfighters and early adopters of the Internet."

In this serie of articles i will try to explore many aspects and impact of the net decentralized architecture. How it emerged, where it's going, how we can react... In a more exploratory way, i'll look at what can we dream of for the future as we progress toward that goal.

For the lucky few who were able to witness the growth of the web from it's infancy it has been a bumpy ride with it's highs and lows. Overall it has been a very pleasant experience, linking people from all over the globe to form new and unprecedented projects. But in the late 1990 came the big players following the newly formed crowds of netizens.