Here we are, let’s see where it takes us. I’ve tried starting a blog before. A few times. Some I never did anything with. Other’s prospered for a while and then fell apart. One reason was that I have been inherently incomfortable setting up a blog hosted on corporate services. It’s just so cumbersome. They log my IP address and I have no idea who they could be passing this information too. They also log the readers IP address. They could take down my blog or suspend it at any time, and there is no way to dispute this. All I would be able to do is appeal to their good will. While they can find out about me, including where I live and other personal information, I have to deal with an anonymous and unaccountable organisation. And it is a corporation. While I do not necessarily want to get paid for the creative work of writing and maintaining a blog, publishing pictures and video, I just don’t like the idea to let others make money on the back of this labour.
And don’t be mistaken, that’s exactly what all those social network providers do. Just like any corporation, they are interested in one thing: the bottom line. They make their money with data mining and advertisement. They are taking control of your data, including personal information about you and your visitors, your interests and what kinda products you use and buy. They sell your life. And ironically, the only reason they are able to do this, is because you work for them for free. You give them your time and your labour. And you get back free hosting, and a free content management system. But hosting isn’t expensive and open and there’s loads of open and free content management systems out there.
So when network23 came along, and started offering blogs hosted by sound people, who are in it for passion and fun, who are committed to privacy and to creating a society on the basis of social, economic and ecological justice, I went for it. Big cheers to the network23 folks! You rock!
Let’s see what happens here. I hope this attempt will be more successful than my previous ones.
One thing is clear: I am much more enthusiastic, and I finally feel comfortable accessing my own blog. So this should help.
So what can you expect on this blog? Basically, I’ve been thinking about different projects for a while. Friends come to me with other ideas. Most of them we don’t have the time or energy to actually make them happen. The other day I had a brainstorming session with a friend, talking about an idea for a documentary around the crisis, freedom of movement, and the erosion of identity and culture caused by the lack of future in certain physical spaces.
We ended up talking about setting up a public scrapbook for this project. We are starting out with lots of questions, but don’t really understand what is going on. We want to document this journey, trying to make sense of all this nonsense that is going on.
That’s pretty much what inspired me to try and get this going. There’s so many interesting conversations, books, ideas floating all around me. I want to keep a record of what is happening. I want to make them accessible to others. These are exciting times. We don’t know where we are headed. It looks pretty dire, and things might turn from bad to worse. But maybe they will get better. The uprising in Egypt was a huge inspiration. The internet lets us communicate what is happening in uprisings without the distorted lens of the big media corporations. Hell, Aljazeera was even quoting tweets during their live coverage.
People are demanding to have a say in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Jemen… There is so much anger and so much hope.
And here in London, the students got pissed off about tuition fees. They turned out en masse, not about their own fees, but those of the future generations. And their hive mind went beyond the traditional do’s and dont’s of how to protest. If the NUS called a march, it didn’t mean they could control it. Hell, that weasel Aaron Porter got chased off by his constituency. They know that politicians are going to tell them lies in order to get votes. And they know that you have to keep mobile. Seeing the ‘civic swarm’ in action is amazing. A bunch of kids run down the street, and if they encounter an obstacle, they change direction. They turn like a flock of birds, individuals moving together, but with no leaders. Suddenly the front row is somewhere in the middle of the march and some other kids are taking the lead. Groups are forking off and joining at will. It’s amazing!
Social tagging: aljazeera > blog > civic swarm > corporate media > corporate providers > corporate social media > culture > cuts > data mining > democracy > documentary > egypt > film > free labour > identity > IP > labour > logging > mubarak > network23 > NUS > protest > scrapbook > social media > social networking > students > tuition fees > uprising