Monthly Archives: February 2013

Did obsolete rules kill Aaron Swartz?

Leave a comment

Does the death of Aaron Swartz, the 26 year-old founder of Reddit, and one of the developers of the RSS web feed format, represent the challenges we face in the early emergence of an economy of the  SYSTEMIC  value-system? Swartz was the typical representative of the healthy Egalitarian vMEME that characterizes the knowledge economy. It is based on the democratization of everything that has emerged in the information age. From the democratization of information itself, to the democratization of the means of production, this vMEME believed in informing and distributing resources equally. These are values based on economies of abundance where sharing, collaboration and open source define its core values. Its disruptive nature is making traditional Orange obsolete with every passing day.

In the last few years, Swartz tried to knock down more barriers to the old proprietary Strategic Enterprise vMEME  by hacking into MIT’s servers and downloading millions of academic papers making them available to the public. In a world where the Regulatory vMEME might have evolved with the times, this wouldn’t have been a problem, as these papers would have invited the input and collaboration of scientists and programmers through the phenomena of crowd sourcing and created new technologies for all of us to share. But, alas, the Justice Department didn’t see it that way, and vigorously pursued Swartz’s prosecution, which resulted in his suicide.

The obvious question is how do we design a new laws that can accommodate the coming complexity while at the same time still preserve old structures like copyright protections. How do we draw balance between proprietary discoveries and the drive to democratize everything that is digitizable?

Like!
6

Is Another Housing Bubble on the Way?

Leave a comment

It seems that anyone who hasn’t bought into Wall Street’s direction over the last 1½ decade is emerging as a long-term systemic thinker. What we call in value-systems a Seventh Level thinker. In a confirmation of what I’ve been talking about in my presentations over the last three years, David Stockman, Reagan‘s budget director is warning of another housing bubble. See the interview here:




His description of what’s fueling the new bubble confirms my claims that enormous amounts of capital have remained in the hands of exploitative  and unhealthy levels of the Strategic and Feudal Memes who continue to manipulate the only asset that doesn’t conform to the exploits of Wall Street. Sub-prime is back, along with predatory Wall Street banks that are still high on bailout money. Fed policies that have swallowed the toxicity of the entire sub-prime debacle and their continued policy of low interest rates give the impression that Main Street is well on its way to a recovery. In reality this couldn’t be any further from the truth. When first time and move-up buyers represent less then 50% of sales, rising home prices represent a fallacy manufactured on Wall Street designed to entice the consumer to spend. I call this phase the decay and entropy phase of the current expression of capitalism where tools from within the system only add to its toxicity that hastens its demise. In today’s economic reality we’ve learned to love the devil we know to avoid total economic collapse while we build a gradual transition to what’s next.

Like!
3