Questions to review in class

Apply the Castells questions to a specific example: Platform Co-operativism, Climate justice , OWS, Arab Spring, Indignadas  (or M15), Online civil liberties movement, protests in Brazil and Turkey...

1. What are some of the main features of networked social movements?

2. What are some of the contextual factors they have in common?

3. What is a space of autonomy? What happens there?

4. What is the theory of affective intelligence and how does it factor in?

5: What are the relative merits of culture vs policy change and under what conditions can each be achieved?

Gozim and Offline Educational Resources

I recently came across an interesting project called Gozim, which provides offline access to the entire Wikipedia library. You all might recall the Raspberry Pi I brought in last month (fashioned as a PirateBox); these are the perfect devices for something like this. The idea here isn’t so you have your own, personal copy of Wikipedia (there’s another project more conducive to something like that called Kiwix). A Raspberry Pi can be set up as a server in this case, hosting a complete, offline Wikipedia for anyone within reach of its wifi card to connect and browse just as they would if they were online. We’d obviously be slightly remiss to give blanketed praise to Wikipedia as the perfect resource for information, but it’s a great starting point, and it continues to get more robust and thorough with users regularly maintaining it and providing (and checking) citations and source material on which the entries rely.

The Gozim website asks us to “think about accessing any Wikipedia article you might need during a power outage, a remote expedition, a natural disaster, or during a visit to an internet-restricted country!” Moreover, these can be purposed in classroom settings in certain parts of the world where internet access is either not possible or heavily restricted (or monitored!). This article from a couple years ago details how a school in Tanzania – one without electricity – has been using something like this for education, which is especially useful since it has very limited resources and textbooks available for students. A donated Raspberry Pi and 32gig SD card gave them access to Wikipedia for Schools (an offline version of Wikipedia specifically geared towards education and curriculum-based navigation) and several other interactive media. Smartphones, tablets, and personal computers can all connect via wifi. Solar chargers and batteries are all that’s needed to connect environments like this to a growing commons of knowledge and information.

It’s interesting to consider some of the broader possibilities for tools like this, too – especially after thinking about things like Isaac Wilder’s Freedom Tower and the wireless meshing we saw in the Vice film a couple weeks ago (and the whole notion of decentralized internets!). This offline Wikipedia project also reminds me a little bit of other projects with a similar goal: the LibraryBox is one, in particular (this is similar to a PirateBox, but is meant to serve data and resources related to education, healthcare, government happenings, and so on, to areas without, with limited, or with heavily restricted access to the internet). Here’s a good, one minute video about it. Kiwix (mentioned above) has another project they’re working on called Wikimed that serves thousands of free medical articles to doctors, students, and those working in areas with issues related to internet access. I just find it fascinating that such simple technology can be purposed in so many useful (and subversive!) ways.

Protecting Strong Encryption Under the Trump Administration

Although this article was published before Trump's inauguration, I feel the content is relevant to our current class discussions regarding internet privacy and encryptions. The Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) is a non profit organization that advocates for press freedom worldwide. In this article, CPJ discusses the status of press freedom and the challenges journalists are facing, such as surveillance and limited transparency. Protecting strong encryption is important for journalists all over the world to fulfill their role as an independent check of power. The CPJ reached out to Trump during his transition period to discus his plans for future encryption policies, however, Trump never replied and his political disposition on the issue remains rather unclear. Bipartisan bills have been drafted this past year to weaken encryption by forcing companies to decrypt data, making journalist who use certain outlets vulnerable to the surveillance of their sources. These bills have not yet made it to Congress, however, if they are passed it would change the entire landscape of journalism and reporting. In addition, weak encryption would also pose a serious threat to online security for the general public. It is clear that Trump is an avid critic of the press, so it should be interesting to see how encryption evolves these next four years.

Article: https://cpj.org/blog/2017/01/transition-to-trump-why-us-needs-to-be-global-lead.php

The Snowden Revelations

Snowden was motivated by a belief that publics could  get beyond this simplistic and false view of

privacy: “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.”

Here's a great talk by Glen Greenwald arguing against this way of looking at privacy. 

The Day We Fight Back 

Thursday: Occupy, Indignadas and more

99%

1) What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of horizontal organization?

2) What methods of media activism were used?

4) Do you agree with Naomi Klein when she says (something like) the goal of changing discourse a bull shit sedative?

3) What key issues are central to OWS (for example predatory lending that led to mass foreclosures is one and there are a host of others). 

Some examples of related projects

Rolling Jubilee

Xnet

John Oliver on Net Neutrality 

Aaron Swartz on SOPA/PIPA

Please Watch Citizenfour for next class.  This link works!

Here are some questions to consider while watching it:

The extraction of private information about Americans without our consent troubled Snowden, but what were some of the other things that went on at the NSA that he felt were not right?

What did he defect and leak all of those documents?

Why did he go public and announce that he was behind the leaks?

Who were some of the other whistleblowers profiled in the film and what did they do to pave the way for Snowden?

How is journalism portrayed in the film?

Tuesday Manuel Castells Day!

Manuel Castells

What triggered the 2011 mass mobilizations across the world? How can we make sense of these new forms of political participation and action?

Tunisia

The Crisis in Iceland

What they did.

Wael Ghonim on the "Facebook Revolution"

Wael Ghonim on designing social media for real change.

Tuesday May 2

Saturday's Climate March 

Brandalism in Paris during the 2015 UN Climate Summit 

Protest with song.

And with occupation. 

And on a totally different subject...

Here's a response from Didi Delgado:

"This commercial is the worst type of propaganda. It tricks you into thinking social problems can be resolved if only people tolerate their oppression just a LITTLE while longer. It pushes the idea that bigotry, sexism, and transphobia are just differences of opinion that are up for debate, and deserving of civil discourse and equal consideration. And it makes folks think that four-minute commercials are a viable way to address societal ills that corporations have no interest in fixing."