New Tactics in Human Rights

The Multitude answer to tyranny!

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By AllOfUs

What is Ushahidi?

The Multitude answer to crisis management

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By AllOfUs

Rachel Botsman: The case for collaborative consumption

The Multitude Social Movement seen from the consumption point of view.

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By AllOfUs

Production & distribution of agricultural products

Source of this photo

At the core of a healthy economical system resides the relationship between producers and consumers. In a large economy deprived of efficient communication systems a third entity appears between the producer and the consumer, the distributor. In this context, the producer is disconnected from the beneficiaries of its products, and the distributor bridges this gap, not only by establishing a distribution channel, offering producers access to a market, to a group of consumers, but also by giving feedback to producers about market demands. History shows that in almost all such systems the power of the distributor increases in excessive proportions, to become a nuisance for the overall economy.


The distributor controls the flow of goods for a profit. There are different ways to increase profits:

• Increasing efficiency
• Increase the flow by
• inciting consumers to buy more
• increasing the market by adding more consumers
• diversification
• etc. 
• Force the producer to sell at lower costs

The best example is the Wal-Mart network, which is rightfully criticized for chocking producers and for spreading consumerism.

In a healthy economy the financier and the distributor have secondary roles. They are service providers between producers and consumers, they MUST NOT control/rule the economy. Economy is about production and exchange of value. If too much power is granted to distributors and financiers they will inevitably suffocate production forces and reduce society to agents of consumption. Evidence of the second effect lies within official reports that talk about consumers and tax-payers instead of citizens.

The multitude movement restores the role of the producer. This is a natural process as the new technology becomes ubiquitous. It is possible now for the producer to maintain direct relations with the consumers. The role of the distributor within the exchange mechanism is greatly reduced. We are heading toward a more healthy economy!

Visit Economical Alternatives See The Food Basket

By AllOfUs

Dark forces trying to use the new technology to increase their grip on society

 I was 14 years old when I left Romania in the spring of 1990, right after the collapse of Ceausescu's regime. I have vivid memories of my life under the tyranny. Some things that are part of your normal life were considered illegal or were forbidden, like owning a small business, criticizing the government or government officials, or even killing your own home-grown cow to feed your family. We lived in constant fear of being reported to the "securitate" for transgressing ridiculous norms, including openly questioning our own condition. The government was collecting information about the population through different technological means, recording phone conversations, opening letters, bugging workplaces and public places, and also by using a vast network of informants. I heard somewhere that in America the government had no right to spy on its own population. At the age of 14, not knowing what freedom means, I thought that this was an aberration. I simply could not comprehend it.

source of this cartoon

20 years later, established in Canada, I am witnessing a gradual transition towards the same situation and climate in North America. It is now out in the open that the US government is indiscriminately spying on its entire population. Data is gathered by monitoring all forms of electronic communication between individuals and from corporate databases. You cell phone is a bug that you carry with you, it can be remotely activated to listen to whatever happens in your soundings, without any obvious warning.

Recently, Citizen Concepts, a US government tool, launched the Patriot App.

"...the world's first iPhone application that empowers citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities via social networking and mobile technology. This app was founded on the belief that citizens can provide the most sophisticated and broad network of eyes and ears necessary to prevent terrorism, crime, environmental negligence, or other malicious behavior.

Key Features:

• Integrated into Federal Agencies points of contactsFBI
• EPA
• GAO
• CDC
• Custom integration with user employers
• Fully integrated with Social Media (Facebook, Twitter)
• Multiple menus and data fields
• View FBI Most Wanted
• Simple graphical user interface"    source

Here it is if you are so degenerate to participate is this massive snitching operation.

Here is their problem though. WE also have the same tools!
You see, the new technology flattens the play-field, it introduces symmetry in technological means and potential between governments and citizens. What stops us from building a mobile+web application and to incite the population (the TRUE patriots) to log every movement of government officials, financiers and corporate managers ? What stops us from recording and analyzing all their actions with input data from the entire population? In a sense this is what the Internet is doing in a more informal way... Well, let's do it in a more coherent and organized way then! 


And here's something else. What stops you from participating but only to increase the noise level in their data, by reporting FALSE, but credible information. Haha, this sounds like fun to me... They must have some mechanism to sort out credible and non-credible sources. So if you send photos of dirty toilets you will most probably be tagged as a non-credible source, and your effect on the system will be minimized. So keep it serious and credible, as much as possible.

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Written by t!b!
By AllOfUs

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

This is why the multitude is taking over the economy...

Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network

By AllOfUs

Template CCC infrastructre released by Multitude Project

Click to go to page

A new template CCC infrastructure was released today. This Communication, Collaboration and Coordination infrastructure was tailored to support massive and dynamic social movements. It is entirely free (0$), modular, scalable, and can be deployed within hours. It enables groups rallying behind a social cause to plan and execute very complex actions.

This CCC infrastructure connects action groups on the ground with strategic and coordinating centers scattered across the planet. It also offers to the movement tools to connect with the population at large in order to build broad support and draw in various resources.

Contact the Multitude Project for assistance. We are pleased to volunteer our time for a just cause!

By AllOfUs

Multitude Project is officially joining the coalition against Tom Flanagan

A strong coalition is forming against Tom Flanagan.

Thomas Eugene Flanagan is a political science professor at the University of Calgary and conservative political activist, recently notorious on account of calling for the assassination ofWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on live CBC television on November 30, 2010.^[1] He served as an advisor to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper until 2004.

Wikipedia

Multitude Project is joining the coalition!

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By AllOfUs

The collapse of the patent system!

US Patent # 6,293,874

I predict a major war between corporations and the multitude over intellectual property rights similar to the copyright war between the multitude and new artists on one side, and the mainstream cultural establishment (Hollywood, Sony etc.) on the other. This war will destroy the patent system as we know it.




SCENARIO

1) We are moving towards a Knowhow Economy NOT towards a Knowledge Economy

• the Internet technology enhances communication, collaboration and coordination , which gives an economical advantage to open and social entities, which in turn means that sharing information and knowledge becomes a better strategy than controlling and going for it alone.
• knowledge becomes slippery, leaky, hard to control, it "wants to be free"
• the model to extract value from society will be primarily based on knowhow, but also on who you know and on how many people you know.

Having the recipe (knowledge) doesn't mean you are able to make (knowhow) the cake!
The world is NOT short on ideas, it is rather short on people who do stuff.

2) We already see the emergence of the open enterprise and of open collaborative communities of innovation. A good source of information is the P2P Fundation.

Creative Commons is on the raise. Creative Commons is a parallel system emerging out of the conflict between the multitude and the mainstream media/culture establishment. The multitude said: fine, keep your junk for yourself, we'll design our own framework for creation and distribution, and we'll create a separate pool of value which we'll exchange based on our new framework.

3) As more and more individuals move towards open standards and Creative Commons, sooner or later we'll have an open community pushing an open "something" on the market, for which there happens to be a patent. People part of open communities usually don't do the boring and painful patent searching to see if their ideas are already protected, they are too busy co-innovating! The company holding the patent in question will try to defend it, because the open community constitutes an economical threat. The conflict will be inevitable because the two practices of commercialization are incompatible.

3) The legal battle: They closed down Napster and they punished individuals caught downloading music for free. But everyone soon realized that it is easier to win the lottery than to be sued for having downloaded a song. They tried all sorts of fear tactics which in the end proved to be unsuccessful. Gradually, the artists themselves started to realize that the open model actually benefits them. New models of remuneration emerged, which were in tune with the new media. But let's go back to our problem, in our case, who is the company going to sue? Suppose that the open community is a diffuse entity with no head office; not registered as a legal entity. Suppose it is just a bunch of passionate scientists and engineers collaborating to find solutions to solve socially relevant problems; an ad hoc, fluid group based on a wiki (this one for example, or this one, or a million others). As a social entity it looks much like the file-sharing community. Moreover, once the open community launches an open "something" as Creative Commons, this thing will be picked up by hundreds if not thousands of other entities around the world, part of different jurisdictions. It will make no sense, economically speaking,  for the company owning the patent to defend it.

This is the flow... A new culture is emerging. Knowledge becomes free. The way we extract value from our knowledge is by our knowhow associated with it. Patents will die! We need to adapt.

See other reasons in this document "Why patenting doesn't make economical sense anymore"



Visit Multitude Innovation, read about the Discovery Network
See SENSORICA, an open enterprise making open hardware. 

By AllOfUs

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

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By AllOfUs