The Globalization Website – Theories

World-systems theory has been a practical theory to analyze capitalist globalization. The following highlights some of the issues surrounding fragmentation and decentralization which are relevant to modern communication systems.

The Globalization Website – Theories: “Such twentieth-century developments set the stage for what Wallerstein calls a period of transition. New crises of contraction can no longer be solved by exploiting new markets; economic decline will stimulate struggle in the core; challenges to core dominance will gather strength in the absence of a strong hegemonic power and a globally accepted ideology; polarization will push the system to the breaking point. While this chaotic transition may not produce a more equal and democratic world, it does spell the end of capitalist globalization”

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column: “Like many of us, Andrew Greig put a WiFi access point in his house so he could share his broadband Internet connection. But like hardly any of us, Andrew uses his WiFi network for Internet, television, and telephone. He cancelled his telephone line and cable TV service. Then his neighbors dropped-by, saw what Andrew had done, and they cancelled their telephone and cable TV services, too, many of them without having a wired broadband connection of their own. They get their service from Andrew, who added an inline amplifier and put a better antenna in his attic. Now most of Andrew’s neighborhood is watching digital TV with full PVR capability, making unmetered VoIP telephone calls, and downloading data at prodigious rates thanks to shared bandwidth. Is this the future of home communications and entertainment? It could be, five years from now, if Andrew Greig has anything to say about it”

BookBlog: Red Penguin?

BookBlog: Red Penguin?

A challenge to Dan Hunter’s article about open source being Marxist.

Another attribute of political marxism is an belief in mandatory equality. Peer production projects often have a meritocratic culture with dramatic inequality, where founding leaders and high-value contributors have greater prestige, influence, and sometimes financial reward. It’s not considered inherently unjust that leaders of open source projects like Perl and Python have received grant, foundation, and corporate funding to do their work (although visible leaders of peer projects can also become lightning rods for criticism).

This hints at what I wrote earlier that the open source culture is not necessarily one of equality and no rewards. And that it is definitely one of power and distribution of goods. This piece also hints at the possiblity that the efficients of knowledge production in the open source community feed this inequality and perhaps support the meritocratic leaders.

For many people, software development is pretty clearly in the complementary category, where the rewards of prestige and satisfaction coexist with monetary rewards. There are Apache developers on corporate payrolls, and companies supporting open source technologies, ranging from IBM to MySQL, Zope, and Jabber. There are developers who make a living consulting based on free software expertise.

SSRN-Culture War by Dan Hunter

SSRN-Culture War by Dan Hunter:

The changed production relationship of information / intellectual property does spin traditional economics around. Yet the currency of exchange is talent, ideas, and knowledge. These are used to control access to information / intellectual goods. That is certainly not Marxist, but the potential formation of a new power elite. Or not.

“Over the last ten years, much of copyright and patent has come under attack from those who suggest that capture by private interests has had a pernicious influence on public policy. In the related areas of telecommunication spectrum management and internet regulation there have emerged strong arguments for not allocating private property interests, and instead considering these domains as commons property. I suggest that, together, these developments form part of a culture war, a war over the means of production of creative content in our society. I argue that the best way to understand this war is to view it as a Marxist struggle. However, I suggest that copyright and patent reform – where commentators have actually been accused of Marxism – is not where the Marxist revolution is taking place. Instead I locate that revolution elsewhere, most notably in the rise of open source production and dissemination of cultural content”