Zoekresultaten

Data-analyse (nader) geanalyseerd (III)

Hoe overbruggen we de kloof tussen accountant en dataspecialist? Na ruim twee jaar is het tijd voor deel 3 van een serie artikelen over data-analyse. In het eerste artikel werd de buitenste ring van het 'VTAmodel' toegelicht en in het tweede artikel de twee binnenste ringen. Nu worden de toepassingen van het VTA-model besproken.

Log out: A Glossary of Technological Resistance and Decentralization

This book brings together voices from various fields of intellectual inquiry, based on the idea that technological, legal and societal aspects of the information sphere are interlinked and co-dependent from each other. In order to tackle the existing gap in shared semantics, this glossary converges the efforts of experts from various disciplines to build a shared vocabulary on the social, technical, economic, political aspects of decentralised, distributed or sovereign technologies: artefacts which seek to challenge the techno-social status quo by, for example, circumventing law enforcement, resisting surveillance, or being participative.The idea ofthis glossary arose from the need for a workable, flexible and multidisciplinary resource for terminological clarity, which reflects instead of denying complexity. Situating the terms emerging through technology development in the wider context of multidisciplinary scientific, policy and political discourses, this glossary provides a conceptual toolkit for the study of the various political, economic, legal and technical struggles that decentralised, encryption-based, peer-to-peer technologies bring about and go through.Choosing relevant technology-related terms and understanding them is to investigate their affordances within a given ecosystem of actors, discourses and systems of incentives. This requires an interdisciplinary, multi-layered approach that is attentive to the interlinkages between technological design nuances and socio-political, economic implications.The glossary was envisioned as a long-term collaborative project, and as a work-in-progress, as new entries are periodically added over time. The present book collects the entries published on the Internet Policy Review between 2021 and 2023. Therefore, it represents the first volume of what hopefully will be a long-term, ever-evolving editorial collaboration, whose sources of inspiration and goals evolve with the evolving of the broader discussions on decentralized technologies.

The City as a License.

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.

Making the blockchain civic

To what extent can the application of blockchain technologies be employed toward civic empowerment, organizing local civic and circular economies, reinstating trust in civic institutions, or, perhaps, creating entirely new types of institutions?

Radical care

Amateur Cities and the Institute of Network Cultures are proud to present a feminist finance zine titled ‘Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance’. It is a cooperative future-thinking effort from the MoneyLab network, a collective of artists, designers, researchers, geeks and activists dedicated to the task of experimenting with more equitable, diverse, and sustainable futures for finance and economy.The zine is a diverse collection of voices organized in three types of contributions: quickfire interviews (short reactions to big questions), double interviews (conversational long reads), and artworks (projects addressing discussed subjects visually).Today we live in a world that is dominated by an economic system that is global, competitive, and centred around a rational and egoistic vision of the human (homo economicus). In this publication we asked ourselves and over twenty contributors how we can embrace different values focusing on locality, cooperation, and caring. Can an affective and compassionate vision of the human get us closer to homo reciprocans or cooperans? How can we break out of the crisis of imagination, and as Lana Swartz and Martin Zeilinger propose, move towards the crisis of implementation? How we can navigate the relations of exchange and trust between humans and machines, but also, our relationship with the environment. Can we finally not only recognize the climate catastrophe, but also find ways to act against it, through an economic lens, mindful of not reproducing patriarchal and colonial histories? As Denise Thwaites notes, this work starts with careful and respectful listening to voices that have long been silenced. In the words of Ruth Catlow and Reijer Hendrikse: history is not over, we are just beginning!We hope this zine will inspire you and those around you to think about alternative ways in which we could organize our economies. We highly encourage you to share it and let it reach new places. For that reason we attached a travel record card as a cover. Please keep it in motion and get in touch!

The future is plural