Category: issues

“Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics–its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making–are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.”

“Some activities – whichever activities one finds particularly meaningful – deserve a special respect, even (or particularly) in this electronic-overload age.”

If only Congress ran like cloud computing – a system whose architecture works by decentralization. “Think about it: What better example is there in the entire world today of a system whereby a single point of failure derails the entire production process and jeopardizes the integrity of the system at large, than the United States Congress?”

“When Vancouver-based Adbusters presented the idea to the world, it did so in the form of a poster that featured a dancer posed on the shoulders of the Wall Street bull statue, a foggy clamour of demonstrators behind her. The poster asked the question, ‘What is our one demand?’ Activist groups seized on it, as did the hacktivist group Anonymous, and a collective began to form.”

“The first excitement was the boarding up of the library. ‘Closed until further notice’ read the sign on the doors padlocked by Thursday afternoon. A 21st-century service means libraries few and far between.”

European cyber-activists toil late into the night in support of the Arab Revolution. But can they help Syrians the way they helped in Egypt and Tunisia?

“Some dislike its antiwar bent, others the lack of attention to the Holocaust. But the biggest controversy is over its design” – by Daniel Libeskind, unsurprisingly – “which features a giant shard of steel and glass bisecting the building.”

After anthropologist and filmmaker Jonnie Hughes did a documentary on the Insect Tribe in New Guinea’s Sepik Valley, tribe members asked if they could do a reverse visit – in effect, a field trip to England. You might be surprised at what they did, and didn’t, take from the trip.

“Officials at the shuttered Detroit Science Center said today that the museum would reopen its doors on Oct. 27 – if the museum can lasso $5 million in emergency contributions in the next two weeks.”

“Risky Business,” a report issued by the think tank Demos, states that “start-up companies in the creative industries are no more likely to fail than the economy as a whole, and are statistically more successful than hotels and restaurants.” The study suggests that these industries pose less risk “as a result of the passion, dedication and skill of the individuals involved.”