From the page: “Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual’s memory, which is capable of being copied to another individual’s memory.
Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of memes”
And remember this above all else:
Don’t cross the memes!
From the page: “The beauty, and sometimes misfortune, of the internet is that it offers the opportunity for people to experiment with their identity. One way to do that is to switch one’s gender to see how the other half lives. In a text-only chat room the first step is simply to change one’s online name. In the visual “habitats” such as the Palace, there is the added challenge of creating an opposite sex “avatar” or “prop” to visually represent one’s new self. The choice of name or avatar can greatly influence the image one wishes to cast – Bambi wearing skimpy lingerie, Rocky with sunglasses, Sheila in leather and chains, Lyle playing guitar, Hera in a long, white robe. After selecting a new name and appearance comes the even more challenging task of trying to play the role of the opposite sex person one has chosen. It’s not an easy thing to d”
From the page: “Cybersociology is a non-profit multi-disciplinary webzine dedicated to the critical discussion of the internet, cyberspace, cyberculture and life online”
From the page: “Annual income £20/-/-, annual expenditure £19/19/6, result happiness.
Annual income £20/-/-, annual expenditure £20/-/6, result misery.”
The rise and fall of Virtual Empires. How decadence set in.
The science of love.
The rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1% of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20%. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries?
Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of
Complex networks have been studied extensively due to their relevance to many real systems as diverse as the World-Wide-Web (WWW), the Internet, energy landscapes, biological and social networks \cite{ab-review,mendes,vespignani,newman,amaral}. A large number of real networks are called “scale-free” because they show a power-law distribution of the number of links per node \cite{ab-review,barabasi1999,faloutsos}. However, it is widely believed that complex networks are not {\it length-scale} invariant or self-similar. This conclusion originates from the “small-world” property of these networks, which implies that the number of nodes increases exponentially with the “diameter” of the network \cite{erdos,bollobas,milgram,watts}, rather than the power-law relation expected for a self-similar structure. Nevertheless, here we present a novel approach to the analysis of such networks, revealing that their structure is indeed self-similar. This result is achieved by the application of a renormalization procedure which coarse-grains the system into boxes containing nodes within a given “size”. Concurrently, we identify a power-law relation between the number of boxes needed to cover the network and the size of the box defining a finite self-similar exponent. These fundamental properties, which are shown for the WWW, social, cellular and protein-protein interaction networks, help to understand the emergence of the scale-free property in complex networks. They suggest a common self-organization dynamics of diverse networks at different scales into a critical state and in turn bring together previously unrelated fields: the statistical physics of complex networks with renormalization group, fractals and critical phenomena.
From the page: “Space-time fizzes with bubbles popping in and out of existence all across the cosmos – they could destroy the universe and everything in it
THROUGHOUT the universe, space-time is fizzing. Bubbles pop in and out of existence across the cosmos. Mostly, the froth is harmless. Yet at any moment, it could unleash a catastrophic reaction that rips through the fabric of space, destroying the universe and everything in it.”
From the page: “Complexity International is a refereed journal for scientific papers dealing with any area of complex systems research.”
From the page: “Manifesto
From P2pFoundation
Peer to Peer and Human Evolution
On “the P2P relational dynamic” as the premise of the next civilizational stage”
The following essay describes the emergence, or expansion, of a specific type of relational dynamic, which I call peer to peer. It’s a form of human network-based organisation which rests upon the free participation of equipotent partners, engaged in the production of common resources, without recourse to monetary compensation as key motivating factor, and not organized according to hierarchical methods of command and control. This format is emerging throughout the social field: as a format of technology (the point to point internet, filesharing, grid computing, the Writeable Web initiatives, blogs), as a third mode of production (neither centrally planned nor profit-driven), producing hardware, software and intellectual and cultural resources (wetware) that are of great value to humanity (Linux, Wikipedia), and as a general mode of knowledge exchange and collective learning which is massively practiced on the internet. It also emerges as new organizational formats in politics, spirituality; as a new ‘culture of work’. This essay thus traces the expansion of this format, seen as a “isomorphism” (= having the same format), in as many fields as possible. But it does more than that: it tries to provide an explanatory framework of why it is emerging now, and how it fits in a wider evolutionary framework. Note that within the sections, the first subsection is descriptive, the second is explanatory, and the third is evolutionary. In the latter, I use the triune distinction premodernity/modernity/postmodernity, well aware that it is a simplification, and that it collapses many important distinctions, say between the tribal and the agrarian era. But as an orienting generalization that allows to contrast the changes occurring after the emergence of modernity, it remains useful. Thus, the concept of ‘premodern’, means the societies based on tradition, before the advent of industrial capitalism, with fixed social roles and a social organisation inspired by what it believes to be a divine order; modern means essentially the era of industrial capitalism; finally, the choice of the term postmodern does not denote any specific preference in the ‘wars of interpretation’ between concepts such as postmodernity, liquid modernity, reflexitive modernity, transmodernity etc.. It simple means the contermporary period, more or less starting after 1968, which is marked by the emergence of the informational mode of capitalism. I will use the term cognitive capitalism most frequently in my characterization of the current regime, as it corresponds to the interpretation, which is the most convincing in my view. The French magazine Multitude is my main source for such interpretations.
I will conclude my essay with the conclusion that P2P is nothing else than a premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards the profit motive. What I have to convince the user of is that 1) a particular type of human relational dynamic is growing very fast across the social fields, and that such combined occurrence is the result of a deep shift in ways of feeling and being. 2) That it has a coherent logic that cannot be fully contained within the present ‘regime’ of society. 3) As such, it is not an utopia, but, as ‘an already existing social practice’, the seed of a major transformation to come.
