Us Now

[FastTadpole]

Us Now
A film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the internet.
http://www.usnowfilm.com/

Quote:In a world in which information is like air, what happens to power?

New technologies and a closely related culture of collaboration present radical new models of social organisation. This project brings together leading practitioners and thinkers in this field and asks them to determine the opportunity for government.

Can we all govern?

Us Now looks at how 'user' participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever. Us Now follows the fate of Ebbsfleet United, a football club owned and run by its fans; Zopa, a bank in which everyone is the manager; and Couch Surfing, a vast online network whose members share their homes with strangers.

One aspect of this film explores the idea of group sharing of resources and information on a mass scale. It can be applied to business, advice, democratic governance, products, software and even living space. It creates an market where you invest time/effort and in return are accepted into a world of free products, services and information. I'd have to compare it with a ratio based torrent tracker with an ebay for everything and your capital is your reputation and contribution to the community. It implies this transaction/sharing medium to be the internet, for efficiency but there is no reason it could not be transplanted to the meatspace (real world). A lot of applications of this idea would be better served offline, the library for example.

The potential problems I can see in this model is hijacking of identity, spamming, censorship, potential mass influence from lobbyists, special interest group, corrupt administration or corporate interests used to sway opinion, votes or capital via block voting or multi-user accounts to concentrate reputation capital. Faith and trust are a backbone for many of the current projects and in an ideal world that would be enough.

With reputation used a capital it can be exploited through a the many ways the current market forces exploit money. Lessons should be learned from the mistakes of usury, fraud, leveraging and collusion. It would be more difficult though since you cannot realistically have a fractional reserve of people but we should be wary of manipulation.

A primary issue I see is the fact information could be largely based on opinion and not proofs, especially applicable to the long term or point of no return decisions based the tapping into the public mind. Majority opinions are not always correct and are often quite the opposite. We'd be prey to groupthink in this model without proper regulation, identity verification and security. To avoid an orwellian model taking this market over there would have to be absolute transparency and accountability on all levels from the gatekeepers (ISPs, Admins, etc.) to the users. If we can achieve that then anything is possible.

It's a good basic idea, it is an old idea given new life and is applicable in many situations today but by no means any situation. Further thought into the pitfalls of such a system need to be addressed before the agenda is pushed forward across the board.

I've made a conversion of the mp4 available on the site to AVI/XVID/Mp3 Format. It is available on the ConCen tracker now.
http://concen.org/tracker/torrents-details.php?id=11132

[April]

bump.



opinions? thoughts?

watch the video.

[staceysugar]

Hi is there a torrent for this file up at ConCen? Or should I download the .flv, convert and upload?:)

[TriWooOx]

Already uploaded...

http://concen.org/tracker/torrents-details.php?id=11132