In fall of 2014, former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced his plan to maintain US superiority against rising powers (i.e. Russia and China). His claim was that the US cannot lose its technological edge – and thus superiority – against a modernizing Russia...
Guest Post by Deborah AvantAnyone remember that 1980s Terry Gilliam film Brazil - a futuristic dystopia where overreliance on bizarre and mostly broken machines led to equally bizarre social...
A large and growing problem, apparently. Via Jim MacDonald, who brings greater publicity to the plight of S.K.S. Perry, a self-published author who discovers that his book is already being sold by...
Glenn Greenwald reports on the case of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former Wikileaks volunteer. The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed Jonsdottir's Twitter records, as well as...
Julian Assange has a problem. When pressed by human rights organizations to redact any current or future published documents because they too feared the effects on Afghan civilians, he reportedly replied that he had no time to do so and "issued a tart challenge for the human rights organizations themselves to help with 'the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents.'" Leaving aside his alleged claims about the moral responsibility of human rights groups for his own errors, the charitable way to think about his reaction is that Assange wants to do the right thing but simply...
A few days ago, Charli pondered "whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance." And she provided a link to an excellent video about Iranian bloggers. I haven't been able to get the question or the video out of my head. This is not my topic/area of research, but I will offer a few tentative thoughts to see if it will spark some discussion...What color is your burqa?If we were to visualize the Internet, would we not see a vast social space populated by individuals (men and women) wearing burqas,...
Uruguayan producer Fede Alveraz uploads a short 4-and-a-half minute film of giant robots destroying Montevideo to YouTube and now has a $30million dollar contract to develop a feature length film of it. Alveraz says it cost him $300 to produce -- call me a skeptic on that point -- but it is cool how quickly information technologies open space for new voices....
A group from MIT won DARPA's recent balloon challenge. In case you missed it, DARPA placed ten 8-foot red balloons around the country on Friday and issued a challenge to groups to be the first to identify the correct location of all of them. The winning group received $40k.Here's how DARPA defined the challenge:a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored,...
Maureen Dowd's op-ed Stung by the Perfect Sting rattled some cages in the blogosphere this week. Laura McKenna calling her a whiner, implying the post was really about her own bad blogger press. Tim Burke claiming she is dissing bloggers by failing to reference our own grand debates over anonymity. Danny being Danny Drezner accusing Dowd of comparing bloggers to muggers. The column seems widely interpreted as a slam against the new media. I was sorry that none of these posts engaged the actual story in the article, which had almost nothing to do with the blogosphere per se. Part of this is...
Yesterday Channel 4 in the UK aired the above video, allegedly recorded on a mobile phone and smuggled out of the country by human rights activists, apparently of Sinhalese soldiers massacring Tamil noncombatants earlier this year. The Sri Lankan government (naturally) argues it is a fabrication. Human Rights Watch's James Ross says "there is no way to tell if the footage is genuine," but argues that the release of the film underscores the need for an "objective" inquiry into atrocities - by both sides - during the conflict. I agree with Human Rights Watch in general - that whatever the...
Mark Beissinger, in a fantastic article entitled "Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions" (abstract), develops an account of what he terms "modular revolutions":In the study of collective action, the notion of modularity has often been applied to the borrowing of mobilizational frames, repertoires, or modes of contention across cases. The revolutions that have materialized among the post-communist states since 2000 are examples of a modular phenomenon in this sense, with prior successful examples affecting the...
Max Harper, who piloted the concept of the Blueprint for Change videos for President Obama's 2008 campaign, provided a point-by-point playbook today for how the Obama campaign used Web 2.0 to win the election.At first, I found myself wondering how he could speak so candidly about it. But then again, Harper and everyone in the room understood one key feature of the political revolution he was describing: that because of the dynamic relationship between information technology and politics, every single thing he told us about campaign strategy and Web 2.0 would be out of date anyway by 2012.