The Bitcoin Sun, No. 1-4 (2011)
Filed under e-zine | Tags: · bitcoin, business, computing, cryptography, decentralization, economy, electronic money, entrepreneurship, free software, internet, money, p2p, software, technology
The Bitcoin Sun: The Rise of Namecoin
Edition 4, 6 June 2011
Includes story about Namecoin project, and interview with Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party.
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The Bitcoin Sun: Bitcoin and the Faceless Entrepreneur
Edition 3, 29 May 2011
The Bitcoin Sun: The Low Over-Head Revolution
Edition 2, 23 May 2011
Includes feature article by Kevin Carson.
The Bitcoin Sun: From Alice to Bob
Edition 1, 15 May 2011
Manuel Castells: The Informational City: Economic Restructuring and Urban Development (1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · decentralization, global city, information technology, service economy, urbanism
The cities and the regions of the world are being transformed under the combined impact of a restructuring of the capitalist system and a technological revolution. This is the thesis of this book, now in paperback. Castells not only brings together an impressive array of evidence to support it but puts forward a new body of theory to explain it. He analyzes the interaction between information technology, economic restructuring and socio-spatial change through the empirical observation of contemporary national, urban and regional processes in the capitalist world, with emphasis on the United States. The author summarizes a very wide range of evidence of urban and regional development, and isolates the causes and consequences of the processes and trends that may be observed.
Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 1991
ISBN 0631179372, 9780631179375
Length 402 pages
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Comment (0)Alexander R. Galloway: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · code, control society, decentralization, internet, network culture
“Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language; computer languages have their own syntax, grammar, communities, and cultures. Instead of relying on established theoretical approaches, Galloway finds a new way to write about digital media, drawing on his backgrounds in computer programming and critical theory. “Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated socio-technical topics like protocol,” he writes in the preface.
Galloway begins by examining the types of protocols that exist, including TCP/IP, DNS, and HTML. He then looks at examples of resistance and subversion—hackers, viruses, cyberfeminism, Internet art—which he views as emblematic of the larger transformations now taking place within digital culture. Written for a nontechnical audience, Protocol serves as a necessary counterpoint to the wildly utopian visions of the Net that were so widespread in earlier days.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262072475, 9780262072472
260 pages
Review: Jason Lesko (RCCS, 2005).
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