26C3: internet politics 2010, defence of the digital habitat, internet utopia, decentralized technologies and implementing Cryptonomicon

“It seems like the Crypt is their worst nightmare.”

(Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon)

China spearheads the anything-goes movement of technology-based societal control, authoritarian countries worldwide follow suit, and we yet don’t know whether western democracies will manage to at least remain in their currently mediocre shape if one of the many ongoing global developments and crisis should ever have a major and disruptive societal impact. From the perspective of the freedom and unhindered flow of information, the internet makes a bad expression these days and things haven’t changed for the better in the last year and the naughties.
John Perry Barlow’s “fuck them” Read the rest of this entry »

Crowdsourcing of political investigation? The problem of web-based ad-hoc collaboration

A couple of days ago, I mentioned Wikileaks‘ scoop of leaking the apparently horrid contracts between the Federal Republic of Germany and Toll Collect, a joint-venture of Daimler-Chrysler, Deutsche Telekom and Cofiroute.

When Germany’s leading webpolitics site netzpolitik.org brought the message (“Toll Collect wird offen”), its leading brain Markus Beckedahl asked his broad and usually helpful audience how, with which tools and techniques some 10,000 pages of contract papers could collaboratively be analyzed to quickly find the rascalities that everyone was expecting to find there. I was split on whether this could work out or not, whether such a task is suited for social ad-hoc collaboration or not.

Back in 2004, I was working with a

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