Networks and globalization
Jim Davis

While “globalization” describes a stage of capitalism, it also implies a threshold of history. Here networks have much to offer. As Castells and many others have pointed out, networking technology is not exclusively a tool of Capital, by Capital, and for Capital. The open-standards common-carrier properties of the Internet makes it a playing field (although maybe not level), or battleground, in any case contested space, and not a proprietary theme park. The origins of the Internet as the ur-network are illustrative. Many of the various streams that led to the Internet flowed from utopian, oppositional, autonomous, rebellious springs. The urge to communicate, to share, to create reflects the possibilities of a new world.

Il Net - Criticism di Geert Lovink
Indagare le “limitazioni del software” e le “dinamiche di gruppo”
Vincenzo Bitti

L’attenzione di Lovink è dunque rivolta alle effettive concrete dinamiche che si vanno svolgendo in Rete e all’interazione reciproca con i software che determinano tali dinamiche e da cui i software stessi sono determinati. Un’analisi concentrata soprattutto sul “software sociale” della Rete, al lavorio quotidiano che avviene su e intorno ad essa, alle trame dei discorsi che si sviluppano e si avviluppano sulle mailing-list, sui blog, ma anche agli eventi off-line e ai rapporti che si organizzano grazie alla Rete stessa. Lovink diffida delle grandi teorie, guarda con diffidenza ai guru dei new media.

The Parliament Of Things
David M. Berry

The King after many wars, now weary and despondent, is bankrupt of ideas and concepts. He is forced to call together a body, the Estates Generalé, that has not been called for nigh three hundred years. The first and second estate are hierarchical and managerial in thought, and only able to appropriate the ideas and concepts of others. The third estate, the commons, rich in creativity and life, is also summoned to the capital at his Majesty’s pleasure to talk and fill the coffers of the king, to create through lively debate and respectfully to handover their concepts and ideas. The messengers are sent throughout the land to proclaim the royal command and on the day the 1st May they meet in historic walls, a Parliament of Things.

The Sovereignty of the Code
(and The Sovereignty of the Code II)
Nicholas Ruiz

There is no need to reject the promises of biotechnology with regard to the human Code and its technological products. What needs to be rejected is the sequestering of the Code via patents and corporate hegemony as part of genetic industry, because it violates the sovereignty of the human species. There is a nostalgia for supremacy in control of the Code. In line with historical trends, the illusory power of the Code, (like military power, economic power, technological power, etc.), is being concentrated in the hands of the few. The effects of this concentration will however, be quite real. History has shown us how problematic this concentration of power can be, regardless of its historiographic location.

Data should be free
Rob van Kranenburg

Europe’s Future and Emergent Technology Programs as well as the major corporate labs as the new EU vision of Digital Territory have fallen unequivocally for pervasive computing (ubicomp, ambient intelligence, things that think, i3, Disappearing Computer Initiative) which for the first time in the history of technology sets forth its own disappearance as technology as fundamental to its success. The result will be dumb interfaces that hide all keys to the technology that drives it and consequently it will keep citizens from being able not only to fix it when it is broken but to build on it, to play with it, to remake, remodel, reuse it for their own ends. I believe this being able to negotiate stuff, stuff that is axiomatic thinking embodied, is called: creativity.