Tags: democracy

Office politics: A working letter

Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live.

Mandy, as always, hits the nail on the head.

When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice. Like all things that require practice, if you don’t practice it often, you lose it.

How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens | James Bridle | Opinion | The Guardian

James describes an ancient Greek machine called the kleroterian:

The method of governance embodied in the kleroterion, which dates back to the very establishment of democracy, is called sortition, meaning selection by lot, as opposed to election by vote.

Democratize the Internet Now! | New Republic

It is a sad and beautiful world wide web:

The technology that let people make web sites never went away. You can still set up a site as if it were 1995. But culture changes, as do expectations. It takes a certain set of skills to create your own web site, populate it with cool stuff, set up a web server, and publish your own cool-stuff web pages. I would argue that those skills should be a basic part of living in a transparent and open culture where individuals are able to communicate on an equal field of play. Some fellow nerds would argue the same. But most everyone else, statistically, just uses Facebook and plays along.

Paul Ford shines a light on the solution:

Standing against this tide of centralization is the indie web movement. Perhaps “movement” is too strong—it’s more an aesthetic of independence and decentralization. The IndieWebCamp web page states: “When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.” You should own your information and profit from it. You should have your own servers. Your destiny, which you signed over to Facebook in order to avoid learning a few lines of code, would once again be your own.

Beautiful, beautiful writing:

We could still live in that decentralized world, if we wanted to. Despite the rise of the all-seeing database, the core of the internet remains profoundly open. I can host it from my apartment, on a machine that costs $35. You can link to me from your site. Just the two of us. This is an age of great enterprise, no time to think small. Yet whatever enormous explosion tears through our digital world next will come from exactly that: an individual recognizing the potential of the small, where others see only scale.

RIP, Change.gov

This is why the Internet Archive matters. It is now the public record of Obama’s broken promise to protect whistleblowers.

I feel very bad for the smart, passionate, talented people who worked their asses off on change.gov, only to see their ideals betrayed.

New Statesman - Inside the Parliament Square kettle

A well-written account of a disgraceful situation. "We all go down together, horses looming above us, baton blows still coming down on our heads and shoulders. I am genuinely afraid that I might be about to die, and begin to thumb in my parents' mobile numbers on my phone to send them a message of love."

Long Live the Web: Scientific American

An inspiring State Of The Web address by Tim Berners-Lee. He can't resist pitching linked data at the end, but it's mostly a stirring call to arms.

A Democracy of Netbooks

The bottom-up appeal of netbooks in all their cheap, crappy glory.

Techno-utopian fail - The National Newspaper

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you have created.

The Open Rights Group : Blog Archive » ORG verdict on London Elections: “Insufficient evidence� to declare confidence in results

The ORG have released their report into the London mayoral elections. “there is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared in the May 2008 elections for the Mayor of London and the…