The billion-years rise of extropy — as it flings up stable molecules, solar systems, a planetary atmosphere, life, mind and the technium — can be restated as the slow accumulation of ordered information. Or rather, the slow ordering of accumulated information.

Information is its own force in the universe, which started with energy, became increasingly matter, but also increasingly dematerialized through accumulated information.

So writes Kevin Kelly in a very important review of the role of information in countering the natural entropy of the universe.

Excerpt:

“The technium can be understood as a way of structuring information beyond biology. Foremost among all inventions is language, and its kin writing, which introduced a parallel set of symbol strings to those found in DNA. But the grammar and syntax of language far outstrips the flexibility of the genetic code. Literary inventions like the book index, punctuation, cross-references, and alphabetic order permitted incredibly complex structures within words; printing broadcast them. Calendars and other scripts captured abstractions such as time, or music. The invention of the scientific method in the 17th century was a series of deepening organizational techniques. Data was first measured, then recorded, analyzed, forecasted and disseminated. The wide but systematic exchange of information via wires, radio waves and society meetings upped the complexity of information flowing through the technium. Innovations in communications (phonograph, telegraph, television) sped up the rate of coordination, and also added new levels of systemization. The invention of paper was a more permanent memory device than the brain; photographic film even better. Cheap digital chips lowered the barrier for storing ephemeral information, further intensifying the density of information. Highly designed artifacts and materials are atoms stuffed with layers of complex information. The most mechanical superstructures we’ve ever built – say skyscrapers, or the Space Shuttle, or the Hadron Supercollider — are giant physical manifestations of incredibly structured information. There are many more hours of design poured into them than hours in manufacturing. Finally, the two greatest inventions in the last 25 years, the link and the tag, have woven new levels of complexity into the web of information. The technium of today reflects 8,000 years of almost daily incremental increases in its embedded knowledge.

Another way to read the long-term trajectory of extropy is to view it as an escape from the material and the transcendence to the immaterial. In the early universe, only the laws of physics reigned. The rules of chemistry, torque, electrostatic charges and other such reversible forces were all that mattered. There was no other game. Self-organization introduced a new vector into the world. Evolution and life open up possibilities for matter and energy that did not exist in the pre-extropy universe. These possibilities (like a living cell) did not contradict the rules of chemistry and physics, but in a certain sense they allowed the new forms to escape the ordinary strictures of these laws, which would otherwise lead to simple mechanical forms. Paul Davies summarizes it well: “The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis…Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.”

Read the whole entry here.

See also his equally remarkable essay on technological autonomy.

Jeff Vail is starting his long-awaited series on the next step for our post-meltdown political economies (see ToC for full project description):

An excerpt on how this change may come about in the core country of the present system.

Jeff Vail:

“The diagonal economy might rise amidst the decline of our current system—the “Legacy System.” Using America as an example (but certainly translatable to other regions and cultures), more and more people will gradually realize that there the “plausible promise” once offered by the American nation-state is no longer plausible. A decent education and the willingness to work 40 hours a week will no longer provide the “Leave it to Beaver” quid pro quo of a comfortable suburban existence and a secure future for one’s children. As a result, our collective willingness to agree to the conditions set by this Legacy System (willing participation in the system in exchange for this once “plausible promise”) will wane. Pioneers—and this is certainly already happening—will reject these conditions in favor of a form of networked civilizational entrepreneurship. While this is initially composed of professionals, independent sales people, internet-businesses, and a few market gardeners, it will gradually transition to take on a decidedly “third world” flavor of local self-sufficiency and import-replacement (leveraging developments in distributed, open-source, and peer-to-peer manufacturing) in the face of growing ecological and resource pressures. People will, to varying degrees, recognize that they cannot rely on the cradle-to-cradle promise of lifetime employment by their nation state. Instead, they will realize that they are all entrepreneurs in at least three—and possibly many more—separate enterprises: one’s personal brand in interaction with the Legacy System (e.g. your conventional job), one’s localized self-sufficiency business (ranging from a back yard tomato plant to suburban homesteads and garage workshops), and one’s community entrepreneurship and network development.

#3 (community/networking) will gradually spread and increase in importance, though it may take much more than my lifetime to see them rise to general prominence in replacement of the Nation-State system. Ultimately, the conceptual “map” of the American Nation-State will re-open, and those pockets that best develop a Diagonal Economy to fill that gap will enjoy the most success in what will otherwise be a time of substantial—though I think largely subconscious—transition.”

From the DataSF website:

DataSF is a central clearinghouse for datasets published by the City & County of San Francisco. The site allows you to find datasets in several ways: general search, tags/keywords, categories, and rating. The goal is to improve access to city data through open machine-readable formats. While the number and quality of datasets is increasing, we recognize there is much more that we can do. You can help by rating and commenting on existing datasets or by telling us what datasets we should make available to the public.

[From DataSF | About]

Recommended blog essay by Eric Harvey:

Summary:

“A lot of forces would have to coalesce for any sort of revolution to happen. More likely, it will take a while, as it did with radio and the phonograph, for mp3s to stabilize and reach a point where the old ways of doing things learn from the new tools. The mess left by free digital music– a collapsed industry, a rising generation of kids with a vastly different notion of musical “value” than their parents, a subset of that set with more eclectic tastes than a teenager should be capable of, and a wave of lawsuits that are going to appear increasingly surreal and ridiculous as they fall into history– is going to take a while to sort out and clean up.

This is our attempt to survey the damage, assess the gains, and try to put the mp3′s first full decade in perspective. Keep in mind that while the mp3 is a radically new technology, it’s not a different musical medium: The mp3 is still “recorded music”– that’s not going to change until Apple unveils the iBrain– but it’s recorded music that moves around very differently than ever before. As a result, mp3s have opened up vast new musical horizons over the past 10 years– how we discover it, the value we give to it, and how we see ourselves connected to other people through it– that both depart from and build upon the innovations that came before it. Everything’s still messy at the moment, but it’s not going to be this way forever– a few decades from now, we’ll most likely find ourselves nostalgic for the mp3 decade.”

Very interesting, and crucial contribution, by James Quilligan:

“In my view, many commons need a social contract negotiated between the commoners and the state. Each one should be negotiated on its own terms. There may be pure commons management on one hand, or perhaps state-commons hybrids on the other — but that’s up to the commoners to negotiate with the state. This is not a sell-out. It’s to protect the commons and also to help evolve the future role of the state. Let’s face it, governments are not going to somehow melt away. We wouldn’t want that anyway, because government provides security and other public goods that we commoners cannot provide for ourselves. The libertarian and fundamentalist private sector folks are (hopefully) learning the hard lesson that the state is a precondition for civilization — and the commoners mustn’t allow the Right’s ideologically conditioned condemnation of the state to carry over into our own thinking. This doesn’t mean a regressive retreat to the likes of the social welfare state or Keynesianism. The next step for us to consider is creating social charters — not state constitutions but charters that are negotiated and apply to specific commons — to determine how our commons trusts are formed and the work that they will carry out, locally, regionally, and globally. It’s not that the commoners have to reach after moral legitimacy (we have that), but we certainly do need legal legitimacy and authority on our own terms, on the basis of birthrights and customary claims to the sources of our livelihood and well-being, not on the basis of the old liberal social contract. Hence, the social charters. The sense of a revolutionary change in the nature of what government does — as it faces the transformational power of the commons — needs to be faced squarely by all of us. Frankly, without the help of the state, how are commoners ever going to stop these privatized enclosures? Yet commoners often focus on the legal aspects of property rights vis a vis corporations and ignore the potential legal benefits accruing from the state. The corporations wouldn’t be enjoying their rights of ‘corporate personhood’ in the first place if the state had not granted them, and, as you know, commoners have grown to mistrust the state (rightly so!) because it has broken the social contract with us in order to empower and privilege businesses. But that flow of legal and political power can be neutralized, even reversed, if we recognize that the deadweight is not property, but private property. We need to turn legally recognized property rights to our favor, and that can only be done in cooperation with the state and the rule of law. The governance of a commons is not the same thing as the legal protections afforded by the state — the two things must not be equated, but I’m afraid many commoners have indeed conflated them, somehow assuming that the co-governance of a commons is all that’s needed. That’s reductionist thinking.

That’s certainly the case at the present. Let’s not forget that the multilateral institutions were initially created after WW II to provide global public goods. This experiment has been bungled for many reasons, mainly the one that you note, that Neo-Liberal ideology has taken over. That philosophy needs to be rooted out from the bottom-up, yes, but it cannot happen without sympathetic support from the top-down. Yet this is not simply a matter of tone, it’s a matter of actual laws and institutions. The commons will never scale up to the global level (or, to put it another way, become scale-free) simply through associations of like-minded commoners. It also needs institutional support from governments and the private sector, of course, to the extent that they will endorse this tripartite arrangement; but it also requires institutional support at the transboundary level of global common goods. The sky, the Arctic, the seabeds all need to have specific watchdogs and managers — who is capable of organizing that? Not commoners, not public sector or private sector. They have no authority to do so and never will under the current circumstances. That’s why the commoners and multilateral institutions are (ultimately) natural allies — which commoners have not yet realized. The break will come when government power evolves upwardly to empower new multilateral institutions in charge of managing specific global commons, and downwardly to the commoners who are vigilantly watching the commons across the world and who will work alongside the multilateral institutions for the protection of the commons — now with actual authority for the global commons. The time will come when commoners will sit on the board of the (existing and new) multilateral institutions, along with government reps (let’s keep the private sector out of this). I don’t see anyone grappling with these matters in the conference document — our commoners appear to be walking over a cliff without a global vision. This needn’t happen. The commons offers us the ability to transform multilateralism, but there is not the slightest hint of that here. Redefining Neo-Liberal ideology is not the same as transforming our existing multilateralism — these changes are not going to happen through ideology alone. That’s where the pernicious dichotomy of the digital commons Vs. the physical commons creeps in — the Neo-Liberal mistrust and penchant for enclosure and division is reified by underscoring the specious ideological rift between non-depletable and depletable goods and translating this into major North-South differences (we’re seeing this at the WTO as well as the Copenhagen talks, and it will continue to develop without the global commons discourse). The split in our Solidarity is not inevitable, but first we are all going to have to embrace globalism rather than shun it. Someone must elaborate, in calm and definitive terms, the holarchical unity of the noosphere, the biosphere and the physiosphere (which can only be balanced through a new multilateralism) — or we will not merely have conflicts over resources, we will have a global conflict between the ideological representatives of each of these spheres — wars between the ‘replenishables’ and the ‘non-replenishables’. Without a multilateralism of the commons, this rift will fester and be exploited — not only by our own internal critics — but also by the masters of Neo-Liberalism. Then the commons will become an ‘ism’, we will be positioned against ourselves globally, and all of us can probably expect the worst. That’s what we’ll get without Multilateralism 2.0 — which only our commoners can spearhead (and co- create) by continuing to evolve the broadest possible concept of the commons.”

“Latinamerica is particularly well equipped for these changes (peer production) by their cultural affinity with the values of P2P”, said Michel Bauwens on an interview for Pagina/12 the Argentinian journal. This statement seems to prove itself when one reads Elyssa Pachico;s article “Rural revolution in Colombia goes digital” (first published by CounterPunch, you can find it also at her site).

In poor rural Colombia, where phone lines, drinkable water and decent roads can be hard to find and where the violence that the country has faced for the last decades is tangible, a free and basic infrastructure of “Telecentros” that allows connection to the Internet has been built by the State and embraced by the communities. The Communications Ministry has been building this infrastructure for web connectivity over the past few years and by doing so, the State is embracing a new role in giving communities new means of autonomous production and participation (using Bauwens’ words in the same interview). Indeed, the latest incidents in some indigenous communities with armed actors (guerrilla, army and paramilitaries) mentioned in Pachico´s article provide evidence of the communities’ awareness of the power of the web as a tool for political organizations and citizen participation.

It is interesting to find out that the landscape her article presents is not the hightly interactive Internet we might be used to; it is the basic communication and dissemination tools (email, facebook and discussion lists) that can have a huge impact on their political situation giving social networks another dimension where citizen journalism is an important approach. According to Vilma Almendra, a web producer for indigenous organizations in Cauca interviewed by Pachico, for this communities “It’s not a question of Internet coming in and transforming us, It’s a question of us taking these technologies designed for a globalized, consumerist world and turning them into a tool that’s useful for our needs.”

Additionally, considering that connectivity is low for individuals in these communities, the traditional communication tools like radio and sound systems in public transportation are also having their own share of success. “Activists also record radio shows discussing local and international news compiled from the Internet, burn the radio programs to CDs, then distribute the disks to local bus drivers… On eight-hour chiva rides previously dominated by static-filled salsa music, passengers now listen to CD recordings recounting the recent bloody protests in Peru, water privatization battles in Mexico, illegal mining contracts in Guatemala, Evo Morales’ hunger strike – information collected online in the telecentres then disseminated throughout the region…”

I would like to end by posing the question that comes to me after reading and reflecting on Pachico’s piece: how can we read this landscape change and it’s potential improvement if we consider the increasing access to cellular phones in Colombia? This is particularly important since we know that this situation is also providing lower, more competitive fees for Internet access through mobile devices.

My feeling is that cellular phones are currently playing an important role on connecting rural people and their interests with the outside, that this importance is yet to be determined (according to a rescent report by Telefonica and Navarra university about 80% of teens have access to a mobile phone in the region) and that probably once web connection via mobile becomes widelly accesible tools that allow people to follow, spread and feed discussion lists and social networks will improve the potential communication that Pachico is currrently talking about providing real time, non jerarquical source data. Definetely this is something worth thinking of.

Spanish version here

This is a great explanation of the cooperation logic behind Greenxchange, an initiative by Nike, BestBuy and the Creative Commons, to create collaborative open innovation pools for renewable energy research.

The doctoral programme in Media Lab Helsinki will organize a symposium about openness in November 5–6, 2009, which is the second edition of the event.

OPEN 2009 – Media Lab Doctor of Arts Symposium is an event for all interested parties who want to understand the ongoing shift from an industrially organized era to an era of networks and social production. The role and meaning of information is changing from a fixed, well-guarded asset to a continuously changing openly shared process.

Openness is affecting the relational dynamics between different actors. New ideals, organizational forms and practices emerge. They interfere with older traditions and create a space of conflict.

What does it mean for organizations?

The Call for Papers is open during September 2009. For more information, go to mlabsymp.uiah.fi

Springwise reports on the LaidOffCamp initiative:

“Unconferences have become increasingly common over the past decade or so, notable in particular for their low-key structure and participant-driven format. LaidOffCamp is one such example, and now—inspired, in fact, by that initiative—the concept has been applied to education with the launch of (un)classes.

Aiming to provide a more casual and ad hoc way for people to learn something new during their limited free time, the (un)classes website serves as a sort of marketplace through which people interested in learning about a topic can find someone in their area with the passion to teach it. Anyone can create a new class listing on (un)classes, and anyone can sign up to be a student or a teacher. Topics tend to be lightweight and fun, offering a way to learn about things not traditionally taught elsewhere. Examples so far have included How to Create The Greatest Rock Song of All Time and How to Be a Digital Nomad—the only guidelines are that they shouldn’t be offensive or illegal.”

Drax’s engaging, mixed-media report blends virtual and offline interviews and video clips to explore the way social media were used by Obama’s team to distribute Obama’s speech to Africans lacking direct access to the Internet.

Below is what I consider a must-see video, not just because the interesting content, see the above blocquote, but mostly also as a great example of a new format for news, which seamlessly blends traditional media with the new virtual media, real people and avatars, as well as showing the furious backchanneling is now accompagnying world events, even in countries such as Ghana.