Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic: “I found Shane Snow’s essay on prison reform — “How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix the Prison System” — through hate-linking…. Some of my hate-linking friends began their eye-rolling about Snow’s article with the title, which references two of Silicon Valley’s most hyped technologies. With the current focus on the U.S. as an “innovation economy,” it’s common to read essays predicting the end of a major social problem due to a technical innovation.Bitcoin will end poverty in the developing world by enabling inexpensive money transfers. Wikipedia and One Laptop Per Child will educate the... (More >)
Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain
UK Government Office for Science: “In a major report on distributed ledgers published today (19 January 2016), the Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity. A distributed ledger is a database that can securely record financial, physical or electronic assets for sharing across a network through entirely transparent updates of information. Its first incarnation was ‘Blockchain’ in 2008, which underpinned digital cash systems such as Bitcoin. The technology has now evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems and... (More >)
Open data can unravel the complex dealings of multinationals
Brett Scott in The Guardian: “…Just like we have complementary currencies to address shortcomings in national monetary systems, we now need to encourage an alternative accounting sector to address shortcomings in global accounting systems. So what might this look like? We already are seeing the genesis of this in the corporate open data sector. OpenCorporates in London has been a pioneer in this field, creating a global unique identifier system to make it easier to map corporations. Groups like OpenOil in Berlin are now using the OpenCorporates classification system to map companies like BP. Under the tagline “Imagine an... (More >)
Why it is time to redesign our political system?
Article by Pia Mancini: “Modern political systems are out of sync with the times we are living in. While the Internet allows us unprecedented access to information, low costs for collaborating and participating, and the ability to express our desires, demands and concerns, our input in policymaking is limited to voting once every two to five years. Innovative tools, both online and offline, are needed to upgrade our democracies. Society needs instruments and processes that allow it to choose how it is governed. Institutions have to be established that reflect today’s technological, cultural and social realities and values. These... (More >)
US government and private sector developing ‘precrime’ system to anticipate cyber-attacks
Martin Anderson at The Stack: “The USA’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is soliciting the involvement of the private and academic sectors in developing a new ‘precrime’ computer system capable of predicting cyber-incursions before they happen, based on the processing of ‘massive data streams from diverse data sets’ – including social media and possibly deanonymised Bitcoin transactions…. At its core the predictive technologies to be developed in association with the private sector and academia over 3-5 years are charged with the mission ‘to invest in high-risk/high-payoff research that has the potential to provide the U.S. with... (More >)
Holding Data Hostage: The Perfect Internet Crime?
Tom Simonite at MIT Technology Review: “Every so often someone invents a new way of making money on the Internet that earns wild profits, attracts countless imitators, and reshapes what it means to be online. Unfortunately, such a shift took place last year in the world of online crime, with the establishment of sophisticated malicious software known as ransomware as a popular and reliable business model for criminals. After infecting a computer, perhaps via an e-mail attachment or a malicious website, ransomware automatically encrypts files, which may include precious photos, videos, and business documents, and issues an electronic ransom... (More >)
From “Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond”
IDCubed: “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization. The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man. Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed... (More >)
Networks and Hierarchies
Niall Ferguson on whether political hierarchy in the form of the state has met its match in today’s networked world in the American Interest: “…To all the world’s states, democratic and undemocratic alike, the new informational, commercial, and social networks of the internet age pose a profound challenge, the scale of which is only gradually becoming apparent. First email achieved a dramatic improvement in the ability of ordinary citizens to communicate with one another. Then the internet came to have an even greater impact on the ability of citizens to access information. The emergence of search engines marked a... (More >)
Index: The Networked Public
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on the networked public and was originally published in 2014. Global Overview The proportion of global population who use the Internet in 2013: 38.8%, up 3 percentage points from 2012 Increase in average global broadband speeds from 2012 to 2013: 17% Percent of internet users surveyed globally that access the internet at least once a day in 2012: 96 Hours spent online in 2012 each month across the globe: 35 billion Country with the highest... (More >)
The Age of ‘Infopolitics’
Colin Koopman in the New York Times: “We are in the midst of a flood of alarming revelations about information sweeps conducted by government agencies and private corporations concerning the activities and habits of ordinary Americans. After the initial alarm that accompanies every leak and news report, many of us retreat to the status quo, quieting ourselves with the thought that these new surveillance strategies are not all that sinister, especially if, as we like to say, we have nothing to hide. One reason for our complacency is that we lack the intellectual framework to grasp the new kinds... (More >)
