Wikileaks, silver & austerity
- 6 December 10
All articles
It’s interesting when worlds collide. Wikileaks, Banker profits and bonuses, the economic system, perceptions of Governments and the viral nature of information dissemination in todays über connected world. Now that the barriers of collective action have been removed, whether you are a major bank or the Government it might not be as easy to get away with the actions you have in the past.
It’s interesting when worlds collide. Wikileaks, Banker profits and bonuses, the economic system, perceptions of Governments and the viral nature of information dissemination in todays über connected world. Now that the barriers of collective action have been removed, whether you are a major bank or the Government it might not be as easy to get away with the mischief you have created in the past.
When Worlds Collide movie poster by Frederick A Stokes
Max Keiser, profile & the ability to motivate a group of followers
Want to crash JP Morgan? Buy Silver claims Max Keiser in this Guardian commentary. Max encourages his listeners/followers to go and buy a Silver coin from a local dealer, this will remove the metal from the marketplace and make JP Morgans short positions (i.e attempting to keep the price suppressed) unsustainable. Watch the video for a brief explanation.
Clay Shirky would be proud
Remove the obstacles to collective action and people will be willing to participate. In the case of Silver all you have to do is remove the barrier of having to understand the inner workings of a complex system, and they will happily participate in an action that they can see benefits them.
Recent events are beginning to show the cracks in the establishments armour and how they are finding it very difficult to cope with the organisational potential of highly connected social groups, regarding the recent protests at Topshop or the Student protests in the UK as the New Statesman said;
“These young people have been underestimated – by their parents, by their teachers and lecturers, and by successive neoliberal administrations -and that underestimation may yet shake this government to its core.”
It’s true and it’s an interesting step forward in the social web. A connected network of individuals angered by something that corporations and governments used to be able to get away with, are capable of mobilising at a moments notice and with the organisational capabilities usually reserved for organisations they are fighting. These organisations are behaving in a way similar to the Music industry and its handling of copyright infringement. Turning your customers/citizens into the enemy is never going to work, especially when they can organise as easily as one tweet or one Facebook post.
The social media generation are going to move beyond the current constraints that society puts upon them because they can, the tools are available to them. This has never happened before as humanity has never been this connected before, the internet has opened the flood gates to the power of the community.
If only Kickstarter existed in the days of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla the often forgotten genius inventor of Alternating Current and all round crazy scientist way, way ahead of his time. His most brilliant inventions remained unfulfilled because of the constraints of his time.
Nikola Tesla sitting in his laboratory in Colorado Springs circa 1900
Bank rolled by JP Morgan when attempting to provide free energy transmitted without wires through his Tesla Tower facility, until Mr Morgan found out that was Tesla’s plan and pulled all funding away.
Tesla famously ripped up a Contract that would have made him the world’s first billionaire, in part because of the implications it would have on his future vision of free power. If only Kickstarter existed in Tesla’s day we might have benefited more, from some of these brilliant ideas.
Hopefully another genius like Tesla will be born and have all the social tools of the modern world available to them. That really would be a potent combination and one that would usurp the current societal structures that are so outdated to the social media generation.