Peer2Politics

The
cancer of “rankism” persists as a residue of our predatory past. But the urge to dominate others isn’t working any more. Using weapons of
mass disruption, the disenfranchised can bring modern life to a stop.
Humiliation is more dangerous than plutonium.

I was recently asked to review this World Bank publication entitled: “The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States Contexts.” I had been looking for just this type of research on crowdsourcing for a long time and was therefore well pleased to read this publication. This blog posts focuses more on the theoretical foundations of the report, i.e., Part 1. I highly recommend reading the full study given the real-world case studies that are included.

Ben Peters, Assistant Orofessor of Communication at the University of Tulsa, presents preliminary findings of a dissertation chapter examining why the Soviets did not succeed in building an ARPANET equivalent. In particular, he examines Soviet bureaucratic and social structures as decentralized networks, compares them to conventional critiques of centralized power, and speculates on the chapter’s relevance for modern-day practices of power distribution.

The Podemos ‘convention process’ (consolidating the new party’s structures) which began on September the 15th, ended on Saturday, November the 15th with the election of Pablo Iglesias  as General Secretary. He won 88.7% of the votes cast (96.9% valid). His list won the 62 posts for the ‘Citizens’ Council’ and 10 for the Safeguards Commission.

“The impression of healthy competition among a wide variety of counselling and therapy approaches that this picture may give is, in my view, in itself misleading, for in fact they all share one very important assumption. What’s more, despite the appearance of radical contrast, they share it also with psychiatry. This is the assumption that psychological disturbance has its origin within the individual, whether the latter is conceived of as mind or body.

1. We seem to have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance appears scattered and incoherent; the global justice movement a shadow of its former self. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Faced with the prospect, the knee-jerk reaction — even of “progressives” — is, often, fear, to cling to capitalism because they simply can’t imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.