Week 4: I Like Knowing that You Don't Know that I Know and You Don't

Class cancelled.

I should mention, I love how this whole topic of ECD is so readily accessible with all the pdfs and all. I love the opensourcenessosity! I HATE researching for schoolwork and encountering those 5-sentence, small preview-only documents that you gotta register and pay for and cancel memberships and shit.

So about this week’s material….
The Chiapas Uprising. Anti-NAFTA and anti-development. Netwars. Erosion of top-down hierarchies. Got it. I don’t really know what to say about it all. I’m just trying to absorb it all first.

The Internet is a crazy realm. No one knows if identities are real. The differences in people are based on the type of image you project of yourself online. Some limit their Internet use to "fundamental" things like e-mail and stock analysis. For some, the Internet is the biggest part of their social lives. Some use it to show themselves off to an anonymous public, and in this case the Internet can amplify the events in their lives. Others use augmented or fake online personas to hide their real-life insecurities. You can fall in love, save a kitten from being eaten, educate yourself and others on important issues, download the weirdest porn imaginable, and find children to molest, all on the Internet.

What all these things share in common is that they are merely extensions of our personal lives. The one thing we fail to realize about the power of the internet is actually and potentially the most important thing the Internet can offer us, not just in personal tastes and values but in deeply social and political ways that could change the very way we live our lives. It can possibly even flip upside down the way the world is currently running. It is the power of networks and the multitudes.

Networks, hacktivism, activism, education, revolution, government reform, social reform, corporates, conglomerates, exposing corruption, failure, crashes, destruction, conservation, meltdowns, extinction, foresight, opportunities, evolution, these are all terms that can be influenced by the Internet, for better or for worse.


“Institutions can be defeated by networks, and it may take networks to counter networks.” -David Ronfeldt, my brooo.
I copied this statement down in my notebook. I like it. Behold the power of the network!

“You can't see us… but we can see you.” -Creepy Me. Muahahaha.