Citizen Internet

This has been kicking around in my head for a while…

The more I think about it, the more the corporate/government interference with the internet offends me on a very specific level. Here’s why:

It’s not their home – it’s Ours.

It’s like they’re walking uninvited into someone else’s house, moving all the furniture, throwing away the things they disapprove of and making it suit themselves – all without ever asking permission or forgiveness.

It offends me on the same gut level as any other breach of hospitality norms. They take the bread and salt of the internet and leave only their shit and piss.

And I won’t be having with it.

My gaff – my rules. It’s the oldest rule of turf there has ever been.
And the consequences of breaking that rule are, necessarily, severe.

(If the reference is obscure, go here.)

Brin is always forthright in his views, and I’m really unsure of some of his assumptions (let’s start with attitude to capitalism, lack of critical viewpoint re. ‘Enlightenment values’)… but worth a look.

In all seriousness, if anything like Citizen Internet happens, I would want Quinn - and David - at the forefront. Read this, a lot.

Via Bruce Sterling:

We will be establishing, building, maintaining, and distributing a common Open Source Mesh software/firmware that will allow citizens of the world to commonly communicate without telephone or cable companies. The raw product OpenMeshProject.org will free to download and free of charge. The technology will be released and maintained as Open Source GPL V2 project. This means that anyone can use or change the software. Our job as a community will be to maintain this project. We will help to build standards. We will help communities build mesh networks. We will lobby equipment manufactures to join the Open Mesh Project initiative. The idea all revolves around wireless technology that will allow us to connect and communicate with each other without telephone lines, cable, or fiber. We will build private networks that can span countries. We will empower the citizens of tomorrow. At the end of the day a grandmother might find this disk on the street, walk into the house, install a CD on her laptop and join the mesh cloud with 2 clicks. After joining the mesh she starts to see others in her network, clicks to call others in the mesh, joins group calls, or searches for friends online to dial. We as the OpenMeshProject.org community will facilitate the building, offering, and support for this project. We will all build 1 common mesh. We invite people to participate and to offer new innovations. Working together we can secure tomorrows communications needs.

The course of recent events across the Middle East & North Africa have highlighted both the power in organizing & reporting protest movements using network technologies and the weakness inherent in their corporate & state-controlled architectures. While social media & mobile phones have not explicitly created the revolutions we’re witnessing in Egypt, Libya, & Bahrain and the protests mounting in many other regions, they are making it much easier for collective actions to coordinate, inspire, and outwit the authorities. Conversely, ruling classes are now far more savvy to the threat these tools bring and will quickly act to shut down internet & SMS services that might undermine their authority. The tension in this dynamic emerged in 2009 when Chinese Uighurs in Xinjiang had mobile access removed by the government in an attempt to quell their uprising. And these tactics have played out repeatedly since as design patterns for resistance & rebellion formalize into institutional playbooks.

In this context, mobiles offer immediate & direct communication with allies while social networks offer distributed coordination and instantaneous global reporting. Indeed, the ability to capture and share information across the world is ultimately the most threatening aspect of such hyperconnected protest movements. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube empower protesters to be field reporters,capturing atrocities and inviting the rest of the world in to see. It is this universal witnessing that makes a local protest into a global movement. It brings normative pressure from the free world into old and rigid totalitarian regimes. Once such regimes could easily crush uprisings with limited exposure. Now they find themselves cast on the world stage in a glaring spotlight. Dispersed & sympathetic legions of like-minded freedom hawks mobilize around these events lending moral & technical support to ensure their success. Aging dictators wrinkle in the sun as their every word & action is shared & deconstructed by the world at large. And so these rulers move quickly to try and shut down the networks, to hide from the light and roll their rule back into the pre-dawn of geographic isolation.

And yet the revolution spreads.

According to a new report, the Internet police are coming… and they’re not wearing badges. Instead, governments are devolving enforcement powers on the ‘net to ISPs…

Here at Ars Technica, we regularly report on the uneasy relationship between Internet Service Providers and the national legal systems under which they operate. This tension surfaces most obviously when it comes to suing individual consumers for illegal file sharing.

Plaintiff lawyers want maximum cooperation from ISPs in tracking down subscribers to be subpoenaed, while providers like Time Warner Cable insist they can only process so many requests at a time. Denounced as permissive on piracy, ISPs and content industry lawyers collide in the courts.

But a new report suggests that nations are slowly turning ISPs into the off-duty information cops of the world. Eager to placate politicians in order to achieve their own goals (like the selective throttling of data), networks are cooperating with governments looking for easy, informal solutions to difficult problems like copyright infringement, dangerous speech, online vice, and child pornography.

ontact will seek to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and creativity. I’m inviting technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, to come together to hatch new ideas, connect with new collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond. Some of them, like Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, Paul Hartzog and Sam Rose at the Forward Foundation, have been working on these questions for a while. Others come from NGOs and even corporations looking to support and become part of whatever is next, rather than spending money resisting it.

From the development of a new non-hierarchical Internet to the implementation of alternative e-currencies, the prototyping of open source democracy to experiments in collective cultural expression, Contact will seek to initiate mechanisms that realize the true promise of the networking revolution.

The first summit, to be held October 20, 2011 as a MeetupEverywhere and centered at the historic Angel Orensanz Center in New York City, will be a participatory festival for ideas and action, consisting primarily of meetings convened by attendees. Featured participants will deliver brief “provocations” on stage, sharing the greatest challenges they are facing in their particular fields. But their primary contribution to the day will be to join in the meetings convened by other participants, sharing their experience, insight, and even connections to help bring these ideas into reality.

If it’s not the only thing of its kind in the world, so much the better. Let’s connect, conceive, and conspire. Contact isn’t a way of competing with those efforts, but supporting them.

Topics I’m opening for discussion include:

TECHNOLOGY

• Can we build an alternative Internet that can’t be turned off?
• Alternatives to top-down registries and corporate-controlled access

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

• New net-based currencies and transaction networks
• Net-enabled Local Activism and Job Creation

CULTURE

• Arts networking initiatives
• Decentralized social networking platforms

GOVERNMENT

• Proxy voting to expert friends
• open source democracy
• “Filter Bubbles” and how to prevent them

MEANING

• What Factors Facilitate Collective Intelligence?
• The Reclamation of Public Space

But please feel invited to bring your own. I may be initiating this thing, but I am by no means in charge.