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Selco on the Riots in France, False News, and Manipulated Rage: “Every riot can be the start of SHTF”
Selco on the Riots in France, False News, and Manipulated Rage: “Every riot can be the start of SHTF”
Editor’s note: The riots in France have been all over the news and we’ve watched many beautiful, historic places being destroyed. While the whole thing supposedly started in reaction to an increase in fuel prices, it has turned into something far worse than simple protests. We in the US have long suspected that many of the riots here have been funded and that the rage has been manipulated. In this article, Selco shares his perspective and explained how riots helped start the Balkan War. ~ Daisy
Thanks to the situation that is deteriorating everywhere, I think we gonna be witnessing more and more events like the latest rioting in France. I think it is just the beginning.
For this article, it is not really important what was the reason of riots there. The point is that riots like that gonna probably happen “in your town” too eventually.
Why is that?
Without getting too deep into political and economical or any other reason why it might happen to you, two reasons can be pointed out.
The internet and social networks create waves.
The internet as a resource for independent news and opinions is a great thing, but also it may work in a different opposite way. It happens like this all the time so one fake news that is carefully packaged and spun can cause an illogical situation where you have full grown people getting together and involving themselves into something that is actually riot.
So as an end result you are out, together with people who are kicking a police officer or storming the local mall for big screen TVs because you were fueled and raged by something that you read or saw on the internet, something that might be completely false.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Niall Ferguson: The Destructive Power of Social Networks
The conventional wisdom promoted by the developers of social networks was that they would provide immense benefits to society through faster and broader connectivity. That view was shattered by Niall Ferguson, who called services like Facebook and Twitter “crazy ideas gone viral, with deeply negative implications.”
Ferguson is a historian and teaches at Stanford. His views are generally regarded as politically conservative and he has often taken positions that specifically oppose those of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. He was the evening keynote speaker at the Schwab IMPACT conference yesterday in Washington, D.C.
Speaking from a historical perspectives, Ferguson said that human history has been dominated by the tension between social networks and hierarchies of all kinds. Indeed, that is the central theme of his most recent book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, which is available from the link on this page.
“The idea was that everything would be awesome if we are all connected,” Ferguson said, in regard not just to modern social networks, but to inventions such as the printing press.
“But that is a deeply suspect idea,” he said.
Giant social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, do not form an online social community. Instead, a large social network will “self-segregate” into opposing clusters, according to Ferguson. In the realm of politics, social networks have gravitated to become platforms for those with strongly held liberal and conservative views, with far fewer members offering centrist opinions.
A historical perspective
Ferguson said that the phenomenon of polarization was predictable, when one considers similar historical events.
To understand our time, he said, you must go back 500 years to the early 16th century, when the printing press became widely available. It allowed a greater volume of content to be produced and disseminated with a lower cost of communication.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Social Polycultures: Using Permaculture For Building Resilient Relationships
SOCIAL POLYCULTURES: USING PERMACULTURE FOR BUILDING RESILIENT RELATIONSHIPS
It is important to recognize that no physical system is created without social systems and stronger social systems better support our physical systems and vice versa. Each of these physical systems have some assemblage of roles that make the whole project function. For example a permaculture based design firm working on installing an urban permaculture farm might have, designers, office managers, installers, caretakers, etc. Those people are in turn connected to and supported by additional social systems, like families or friends and colleagues that enable them to do the work that they do.
By applying the permaculture ethics, principles, and a similar design process that we use in our physical systems to our social systems we can get better at bringing about greater ease, functionality and mutual benefits in both our physical sites and social organizations and programs. By making these social networks visible and honoring their important functions we can counter the problematic individualist narrative and learn to better collaborate for greater effective change.
PERMABLITZ: SOCIAL SYSTEMS DESIGN IN ACTION:
One example of this design thinking in action can be seen in the implementation of Permablitz’s. As defined by Permablitz Melbourne, a Permablitz is an informal gathering involving a day on which a group of at least two people come together to achieve the following:
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The Facebook of the Future Has Privacy Implications Today
The Facebook of the Future Has Privacy Implications Today
It’s well established that joining a social network means trading privacy for information. Your Facebook friends, for example, get to see that picture of you looking like you might be stoned, and you get to “like” their posts celebrating the legalization of marijuana in Washington and Colorado. Or, perhaps you simply post about your 50th birthday party or celebrating Ramadan. Potential employers get to see all that stuff too, depending on your privacy settings, and there is evidence that some of them discriminate on the basis of age and against Muslims. Facebook, meanwhile, gets to target ads at you.
What’s not as well appreciated, but becoming increasingly clear, is that users of social networks in general, and of social networking kingpin Facebook in particular, are ill-equipped to evaluate the price they’re paying in this trade — to determine just how much privacy they’ll lose over time in exchange for status updates from their friends, and what that loss will eventually mean for themselves and their loved ones.
Part of the reason it’s hard to think clearly about privacy tradeoffs is that data collection now occurs at a staggering scale. Facebook earlier this year announced that it had figured out how to store a billion gigabytes, known as an “exabyte,” in each “data hall” room in its data centers. As people upload two billion pictures a day to the social network, older photos are moved to these “cold storage” exabyte systems.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
