Did British intelligence attempt to derail the Arab Spring?

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gchq-url-shortener-twitter-honeypot-arab-spring

"In the fall of 2010, I was an early member of the AnonOps IRC network attacked by JTRIG and used by a covert GCHQ agent to contact P0ke, and in 2011 I co-founded LulzSec with three others. The leaked document also shows that JTRIG was monitoring conversations between P0ke and the LulzSec ex-member Jake Davis, who went by the pseudonym Topiary.
Through multiple sources, I was able to confirm that the redacted deanonymizing link sent to P0ke by a covert agent was to the website lurl.me."

Well this is weird.  and sad.

Coup plotters; ignore the Internet at your peril

https://medium.com/@thegrugq/cyberpower-crushes-coup-b247f3cca780#.3kaa9mipq

"Today, the TV and radio are not the only means available to get information to people. The Turkish putsch took over some TV stations and did the standard coup style announcement: “we’re doing this for you, blah blah blah.” But they failed to eliminate the Internet, and any blocking that they were able to do was ineffective. In no small part because the Turkish people have spent years learning how to circumvent the social media blockades that Erdogan has put in place at various times. This made the population resilient against attempts to mitigate the cyber weapons they deployed."

This is a really well done article.  It explains mainly that the Internet is a method of communication that must not be ignored.  

How to "smarten up the hive mind"

https://aeon.co/essays/a-mathematical-bs-detector-can-boost-the-wisdom-of-crowds

"One reason that crowds mess up, he notes, is the hegemony of common knowledge. Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information. When you average everyone’s judgments, information that is known to all gets counted repeatedly, once for each person, which gives it more significance than it deserves and drowns out diverse sources of knowledge. In the end, the lowest common denominator dominates. It’s a common scourge in social settings: think of dinner conversations that consist of people repeating to one another the things they all read in The New York Times."

Solution?  Sort out who actually knows pertinent things and give their view more weight.

"Assemblies of the Commons" in France

https://www.popularresistance.org/assemblies-of-the-commons-emerge-in-france/?utm_content=bufferfd0df&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"After this festival, several Assemblies of Commons begun to emerge explicitly in Lille, Toulouse, Brest and several other big cities in France. It must be understood that these assemblies are all at the 'incubation' stage, and each of them is inventing its own operation as informal structures. For most, they met only once or twice.

They have a French wiki to document and exchange practices, and a website to communicate to the outside.

The main purpose of these assemblies is to be a forum to exchange experiences and bring together commoners. They also aim to promote the creation of an ethical economy that can create livelihoods around the commons. They try to identify and develop commons through mapping and meetings."

This sounds somewhat similar to Occupy Wall Street.  An embryonic idea to fix society when politics isn't working.

social media catches a vandal

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/21/graffiti-artist-casey-nocket-reddit-investigation

"One post to the Yosemite subreddit caught the attention of Steve Yu, an investigator for the National Parks Service. Yu reached out to Schreiner, who shared his screenshots of Nocket’s artwork with the investigators. He also posted to the Reddit threads, where users began sending him evidence of Nocket’s graffiti.
Charles Cuvelier, the chief of the National Parks Service’s law enforcement arm, said that social media played a key role. 'When there are acts of destruction and you make them known at large through social media, that is a powerful tool of investigation,' he said."

BUT!

"Some users started posting her home address, though others quickly chastised them. In an update to his Reddit post, Yu wrote: 'Please remember, EVERYONE in our society has the right to Due Process.'

For Schriener, stopping people from posting unverified personal information or abuse in the comments on his blog became a full-time job."

This is great, but the side issue of over-reaction is typical as well.  I don't know what can be done about the outliers who over-react, except what was done in this case, where the cooler heads try to reign them in.

community groups work on collective action

http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/local/new-group-taking-innovative-approach-to-improving-life-for-rapid/article_c4b91cf4-db8e-5cfe-8db6-5bdfbbb6a359.html

"The basic idea is to harness the energy and actions of a wide range of charity and civic groups all at once, and find over-arching goals that can be accomplished more quickly and effectively than if such groups work on problems alone.

The Rapid City Collective Impact group was unveiled at a press conference Wednesday morning at which the group  presented nearly a year’s worth of research on social issues in the area.

Rapid City may be the first in the nation to use this relatively new approach to improve the city as a whole, according to initiative director Albert Linderman."

I can't believe this is a new idea, but I do heartily agree with it.  Community groups working together instead of just doing their own thing makes common sense.

Diversity makes your group smarter

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/

"The fact is that if you want to build teams or organizations capable of innovating, you need diversity. Diversity enhances creativity. It encourages the search for novel information and perspectives, leading to better decision making and problem solving. Diversity can improve the bottom line of companies and lead to unfettered discoveries and breakthrough innovations. Even simply being exposed to diversity can change the way you think. This is not just wishful thinking: it is the conclusion I draw from decades of research from organizational scientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists and demographers."

So much for the Master Race theory.

Wikipedia study; maybe anarchy devolves naturally into oligarchy

http://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-is-basically-a-corporate-bureaucracy-accordi-1746955234

"One of their most striking findings is that, even on Wikipedia, the so-called 'Iron Law of Oligarchy'—a.k.a. rule by an elite few—holds sway. German sociologist Robert Michels coined the phrase in 1911, while studying Italian political parties, and it led him to conclude that democracy was doomed. 'He ended up working for Mussolini,' said DeDeo, who naturally learned about Michels via Wikipedia.

'You start with a decentralized democratic system, but over time you get the emergence of a leadership class with privileged access to information and social networks,' DeDeo explained. 'Their interests begin to diverge from the rest of the group. They no longer have the same needs and goals. So not only do they come to gain the most power within the system, but they may use it in ways that conflict with the needs of everybody else.'”

I haven't read the actual research article yet.  But this would be sad if true.  This "iron law of oligarchy" is new to me and bums me out.  But I think a way around it at times is to set a simple goal, and once the goal is achieved, disband.

What happened to Occupy Wall Street

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/12/revealed-the-inside-story-on-what-really-caused-the-occupy-wall-street-movement-to-collapse/

" Instead of welcoming other progressive forces and actually co-opting them, purists shamed 'liberals,' cultivated a radical macho culture more focused on big speeches at assemblies and arrests in the streets than the hard organizing behind the scenes, and turned Occupy into a fringe identity that only a few people could really claim to the exclusion of the hundreds of thousands who actually made it real.

Occupy Wall Street created a new discourse, brought thousands of people into the movement, shifted the landscape of the left, and even facilitated concrete victories for working people. But at the same time, a substantial chunk of its leadership was allergic to power. And we made a politic of that. We fetishized it, wrote articles and books about it, scorned the public with it. Worst of all, we used it as a cudgel with which to bludgeon each other.

Sure, the cops came for us — we invited them, after all. But we were the problem: When the state tugged hard enough, we tore at the seams."

 This is a look back, mostly, on what went wrong with the Occupy movement.  The main point seems to be that leadership was discounted or scorned, or even discounted itself, which then led many people to believe that the movement had no rudder, so they left.

"Our ego battles are a natural product of a movement that doesn’t have a clear answer for how leadership is to be appreciated and held accountable at the same time."

   I've been a protest organizer.  I've also been to many protests from different movements, including Occupy.  The author's whining about how leaders couldn't or wouldn't be leaders.  This to me is false.  The difference in these type movements is that leadership is a role, it's not a position of power.  It's a slot where hopefully the right person is performing useful organizing actions.  So long as that person does not claim any power thus provided as some sort of right, and so long as they are doing their role well, there should be no problem.  The problem is, like Anonymous people would say, "leader-fagging."  If the power of a leadership position gets to the person's head, then it's time to switch people.  Of course, this never goes smoothly... ego is such a terrible thing.

the Arab Spring is not over

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/12/the-story-of-the-arab-spring-is-far-from-over.html

"The Arab Spring is more than a wave of political uprisings launched in 2011. It’s an intergenerational shift whereby a new generation of youth rejected regimes built by tyrants from a previous era. These demographic and technological trends have actually accelerated since 2011. For example, surpassed the global connectivity average in 2014, with 41 percent of all residents online.
Arab regimes remained stubbornly opposed to political change or evolution, but they have no solution for the deeper societal changes at work. The essential clash between an evolving society and static political system still continues, and in some cases has intensified."

Stay tuned...