Brough Turner says Network Neutrality is the wrong fight – I strongly agree – we should have been fighting for Common Carriage all along! This is a point I’ve been making for some time now.
However, the best way to fight is for communities to deploy their own networks and to interconnect them.
We don’t have to go very far (if at all) to connect Inquiry and Play.
Here’s something fun I invite you all to explore and join in with if you are so moved: http://ow.ly/11y6A
These short URLs tell you next to nothing so I’ll offer a little context.
There’s a group of people I know convened together in open space in the cause of the “metacurrency project (MCP)” … their cause is heavily shaped by the question of play. There are technical dimensions to their work, but their work is aimed at making new things possible for humanity. If I could, I’d be with them now. I’m with them in spirit.
One quick point of entry to their world view (and my own) is in the contrast between Scarcity and Abundance as dominant meme. This is about the attitude in which we engage each other more than about how many resources their are in the world at any given moment. (It’s also a question of not being dominated by this contrast of scarcity and abundance.)
Even accepting some finitude, or relative finitude: as human’s in the application of intelligence we are meant to conduct ourselves in a stewardly manner towards life… that is to say, our behavior should be generative.
So, even though this group is in part engaged in a technical question – building software and protocol under the MCP effort – the larger challenges are social and ideational: how we might live together… opening the space not to offer a final answer, but to situate us in generative spaces of inquiry and infinite play… where the burdensome quality of tasks slip away and joy comes to the fore and where we collectively and selectively form responses and rules with a freedom to mutually adapt ourselves and the rules.
On the voicethreads platform you can add your own voice and your own vision.
Funny how the other night, WTTW/Chicago Tonight covered 4G wireless communications and there was no historical reference to City’s intention (or interest) in establishing a city-wide wireless network several years back. We get stuck on the totemism of the new technology and don’t discuss any deeper issues of collective investment in our common destiny. This is the City where we privatize everything, and sell off (or sell out?) our future first.