Tag Archives: hyper-convergence

Page-perfect Touchscreen e-Reader will Revolutionize Mobile Computing

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page-perfect-perspective-300x169The Amazon Kindle is a nice device, and it handles its job well, but it is just a very clumsy start to what will be a technological convergence few in mainstream media (and publishing) are anticipating, though it may not be far off. The page-perfect, for lack of a better term, e-reading device will make portable electronic reading easier and more comfortable than ever, packing huge amounts of data, as well as wireless downloading and even browsing capability, into an ultrathin tablet touchscreen.

The device may, after one or two initial iterations, come to have the computing power of today’s less expensive laptop computers, and will capitalize on the great discoveries in user-interface technology that have emerged from the introduction of the iPhone into the mainstream consumer market.

Whether it will belong to Apple, or be the next generation of the Amazon Kindle, or whether an as-yet-unknown pioneer in consumer electronics will pull it off, e-paper technology is certainly advanced enough to make it possible, and it’s just a matter of time until someone figures out the best way to market such a product, building on the success of the Kindle, the iPhone, the inexpensive streamlined netbook, and ever more available flat-rate unlimited mobile web services.

page-perfect-keyboard-300x378What is happening right now in the investigation of e-paper technology, at MIT especially, is promising in the extreme, warranting enthusiasm about great leaps in speed and ease of use, as computing circuitry advances to make the tactile e-paper device more like a fully-functional touchscreen.

What looks and feels a lot like paper and will produce ultra-sharp black-and-white text displays, will also be able to produce high-quality color and a mutable graphic-user-interface that allows for typing, searching, scrolling and all sorts of more agile file-search and manipulation. One-touch downloading and nearly full-sized qwerty-keyboard interaction will make the page-perfect tablet into a replacement for today’s netbooks.

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Recovery.gov to Track Recovery Spending, because "Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant"

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obama-online-300x169Pres. Barack Obama announced, just one week after taking office, the creation of a new website, Recovery.gov, which will detail the manner in which all the money from his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, once passed by Congress and signed into law, is being spent. The website is another in a series of steps to create a far-reaching reform of the federal government’s reporting to the public about its activities, with the aim of achieving Obama’s promise of the “most transparent” government in US history.

Economic recovery requires a massive amount of new federal spending, and the administration has asked Congress to find ways to use that wave of spending to implement vital innovations in the overall structure of the American economy, so that some of the “stimulative” effects actually turn into sustainable new areas of compounded growth. That means not only infrastructure, but the fomenting of new industries, like clean-energy businesses that will build a new energy distribution system and new industrial output.

Stimulus also requires the rapid disbursal of funds to specific industries, which will immediately use those funds on projects that will lead to retention or increase of jobs in a given market. Among those industries is the entertainment industry that dominates the city of Los Angeles, and which needs the investment to keep employing the hundreds of thousands who depend on its intermittent projects for their income, as banks are not lending as freely as they once did.

All of this means Recovery.gov is a necessary tool, aimed at informing the public about how each recovery dollar is spent, where that stimulus has been directed, or where there are long-term infrastructure projects getting underway. This is a new wave of information which will also benefit those who are practically or geographically mobile and can shift skill-focus or change location in order to take advantage of new funding, something that can optimize the effects of the recovery and reinvestment plan.

Over the long-term, education spending has a better return-on-investment than any other type of government spending, in terms of generating economic activity, and so it will be instructive for the public to be able to view what sorts of new economic opportunities are being made available and what sorts of new horizons open up for the adults and young people who are able to take advantage of those opportunities.

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Resilient Complexity versus Exposure to Entropy

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All systems fail, all organized interactions are vulnerable to entropy, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And at best, we are but stardust, a beautiful yet haunting explanation of our origins. Infused with light. Doomed to shadow. Whatever your spiritual beliefs, in the mortal physical realm, entropy is always interfering. The intellect often uses convenient conceptualizations to feel it is better understood or more secure, more real and lasting, than it is.

Remember: the only constant is change, so to oversimplify is to willfully strip ourselves of needed understanding, the power of intellect that can do the best work against entropy. To paint in broad strokes an entire universe of experience to exist only in dualities of black and white, up and down, matter and void, is to confuse simplicity with clarity, at our peril. While the best explanation is usually the simplest one, the truth is almost always more complex than we can perceive.

So, we are left to navigate a universe of traumas and disappointments we cannot just dismiss as signs of the wrong thing happening or the other side gaining temporary control over our otherwise pure and decent environs. Darkness and light are lies in that they are not so diametrically opposed as they pretend; there are better options for understanding what they mean. As R. Buckminster Fuller has written: “We have relationships, not space”.

Relativity posits that light and other cosmic forces or expressions of energy and mass are not constants, but exist in a relational continuum. Moving at the same speed as an object makes it appear not to move at all, as with the Earth that carries us through its orbit around the Sun, and our Sun’s orbit around the galaxy’s deep center. We also experience this when we are traveling inside an automobile or an airplane. Light and dark are both wave dynamics relative to perception, frequency, local electro-magnetic activity, even the refractive capabilities of gravity, distance and time.

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Conventional Hybrid Super-computer Reaches 1,000 Trillion CPS

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A hybrid super-computer has reached the astounding speed of 1,000 trillion calculations per second, termed a petaflop. The Roadrunner super-computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory operates on a conventional paradigm of computational mechanics — meaning it operates over semiconductors and established systems of computer circuitry, not quantum computing innovations or molecular processors.

The Roadrunner, like other hybrid super-computers, is made up of thousands of distributed computing “nodes”, each with its own microprocessor and separate memory store. There is a time-lapse between memory retrieval and central processing registry of computation, which means researchers have to come up with creative ways to narrow the ever-widening gap between computation and memory-retrieval time, a barrier difficult to overcome due to the physical limitations of the raw materials.

Roadrunner’s specific hybrid design is a breakthrough because it allows some improvement on this front. According to the Los Alamos website:

Roadrunner is a cluster of approximately 3,250 compute nodes interconnected by an off-the-shelf parallel-computing network. Each compute node consists of two AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors, with each of the Opteron cores internally attached to one of four enhanced Cell microprocessors. This enhanced Cell does double-precision arithmetic faster and can access more memory than can the original Cell in a PlayStation 3. The entire machine will have almost 13,000 Cells and half as many dual-core Opterons.

It is believed the petaflop speed will allow Roadrunner to be useful in calculating the rapid evolution of supernovae, the massive explosions that sometimes result from dying stars, a process which, if understood, can help to explain to astronomers, physicists and cosmologists, not only how the details of cosmic radiation have played out but also: what can be expected in the evolution and decay of certain star systems, and what that means for the physics of stars and galaxies, forces like gravity, the nature of black holes and, ultimately, provide some of the information necessary for testing sweeping theories about the beginnings of our universe.

The Milagro Cosmic Ray Observatory at Los Alamos, using special code designed to trace fluctuation and tranmission of radiation, to map the celestial background and study the effects of interstellar radiation on the Earth and near-Earth objects, would be the forum through which such applications for Roadrunner would be explored. In Milagro’s work with specially designed code to study radiation physics, according to Los Alamos itself:

The major application areas addressed were radiation transport (how radiation deposits energy in and moves through matter), neutron transport (how neutrons move through matter), molecular dynamics (how matter responds at the molecular level to shock waves and other extreme conditions), fluid turbulence, and the behavior of plasmas (ionized gases) in relation to fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It is also expected the petaflop speed will be useful in testing medical advances, potentially projecting cell reaction to chemical treatments, radiation innovations, gene therapy and other complex metabolic interventions that could adversely affect or significantly improve patient prognoses. John Turner, a Los Alamos researcher, says his team expects “proposals in cosmology, antibiotic drug design, HIV vaccine development, astrophysics, ocean or climate modeling, turbulence, and we hope many others”.

The Lab’s website also reports plans to use Roadrunner, starting in 2010, to test means of improving nuclear weapons technology, to enhance performance, and facilitate higher levels of maintenance and security, with a state goal of “maintaining confidence in the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile without actual nuclear testing”.

Molecular computing innovations, like 16-bit, 128-bit or 1,024-bit simultaneous molecular processing hubs, could allow processor speeds to accelerate exponentially, once such technologies are developed and able to be specialized, mass-produced and widely distributed. Research into nano-scale molecular chemical brains or chemical computational network nodes means “nano-chemical computation may soon be possible, ushering in a new era in super-light, super-fast, more versatile computer processing capabilities and, by extension, robotics.”

Computing speed is relevant not only to improving the performance of super-computers and later commercial microprocessors, enabling more advanced research, but also to the practical application of computational solutions for new zero-emissions models of energy capture, storage and distribution, distributed cloud computing processing platforms, the next generation of hyper-convergent online services, neural nets and artificial intelligence.

Zero-downtime Must Be a Standard of the Open Web

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Freedom of information and the standard of net neutrality —connection providers not controlling content or access to content in any way— require that information posted online not be removed, blocked, or made unavailable to readers, so long as the publisher wishes to include that content. For content publishers and content consumers to shape the web experience they desire, not only do we need an ethical standard of total net neutrality, but we need a technical standard of zero-downtime bandwidth guarantees.

Zero downtime is necessary for providing fair service to online publishers and consumers for a number of reasons, not least of which is that some services require a wide-open uninterrupted secure connection. Online voice communications should fit into the net neutrality standard: some connection providers (ISPs) also provide voice telephony services, and would like to prevent low-cost or free voice-over-IP services, but a fair standard for managing basic web connection services cannot allow such interference with competition.

There are a wealth of breakthrough technological solutions that can revolutionize not only communications and mass media, but also the ability of the individual to achieve the self-empowerment of reliable information and to produce and secure data in ways that transcend the physical limitaitons of individual devices or storage centers, if we take advantage of the potential of “cloud computing”, or dispersed IT. Without a constant connection, devices and networking systems using cloud computing systems will be limited in their ability to provide the best quality of service to their users.

Achieving the zero-downtime standard would be in the interest of nearly all entities involved in the Internet business, except perhaps media giants that provide both access and separate telephony services, but increasingly, telecoms involved in the web connectivity business appear to be getting the hint that constant uptime and unlimited data, even unlimited anywhere web access, are good for business. If we reach the general standard of mass-market zero-downtime web connectivity, consumers should have a wide range of new options, both to achieve interesting new services and to protect their data.

As web infrastructure and connectivity standards evolve toward their optimal state, telecommunications should move toward inexpensive, flat-rate calling, eventually with global unlimited calling plans that cost little more than what we are accustomed to paying now for high-speed broadband Internet service. This will of course be a revolutionary moment in telecommunications and will spur a number of currently unimaginable media innovations, though it is likely that for sometime, quality of service considerations will prevent massive content downloads (like digital movie downloads direct to mobile phones) from being workable.

The zero-downtime question, coupled with net neutrality and consumer rights generally, raises important issues about whether media giants are required to facilitate or participate in the evolution of new technologies that capitalize on their services, but also surpass them and reduce their influence. In general, the United States has a unique media-innovation engine driving this debate, the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits any laws that “abridge… the freedom of the press”, and “of the people to peaceably assemble”, both of which relate to consumers’ interests in expanding the online clout of the individual.

The individual is now also the press, the press consumer is potentially part of the press, legally speaking, and anyone can become a publisher in the online media environment. Their freedoms are covered multiple times in the First Amendment alone, while major media companies, traditionally permitted to engage in a certain amount of laissez-faire decision-making, have grown into utilities that are less information providers than they are purveyors of a piece of basic infrastructure.

The open web is a dream that will enable a number of vital new democratic processes to evolve, where consumers and content-providers spontaneously organize to change the manner in which information travels through the broader culture. It will also allow much better access to vital and sometimes esoteric information for the average consumer, and eventually, new forms of digital data security, related to revolutionary dispersed coding platforms and segmented-multiple-redundancy data storage systems.

FCC Chairman Says He Will Take Action to Prevent ISPs from Controlling Users' Activities

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will take regulatory action to prevent internet service providers (ISP) from blocking or controlling users’ access to online content. The announcement came from the FCC chairman after Comcast moved to manipulate internet access —limiting their freedom to navigate— who had engaged in file-sharing online services, presumably in an effort to control access to content for which the cable provider was not being paid per-content-access.

According to The New York Times:

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said Friday that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, should be sanctioned because it had interfered with the Internet connections of users who were exchanging files with other people.

Martin recommends a strong defense, in law and in regulatory practice, of network neutrality, the principle that ISPs cannot “favor some uses of their networks over others”. AT&T has repeatedly hinted at plans to create a new kind of Internet, stratified by bandwidth, where paying services would have the highest speed connections directed to them, and users attempting to access other sites would see their access slowed or obstructed.

Legislation to create, favor or protect a stratified web like that proposed by AT&T would be a direct violation of the First Amendment protection of the free press, and potentially of the First Amendment right of citizens to free assembly. The scheme is part of an attempt by ISPs to charge 3 times for the same access: charge the content provider for their access, the end-user for their access, then charge one or both for the special added bandwidth required to deliver the best connection speeds.

Comcast had claimed that its actions were designed to prevent the hoarding of bandwidth by users accessing filesharing sites like BitTorrent, but not only those trying to access the most bandwidth intensive files were blocked. The Times reports that a Comcast spokesperson has said the company “is developing a system that will slow the Internet connections of people who are moving large amounts of data at busy times.”

Among the concerns of net neutrality advocates, the FCC chairman and web planners, is the long-term meaning for a free society of not instituting firm network neutrality and freedom to navigate principles. If the stratified web were permitted to be deployed by ISPs, they would not only begin to decide what content is most visible or even most visited, they may seek to replace or take over the job of content provider, adjudicating what information can or cannot gain access to a less figurative “mainstream”.

It is not surprising, then, that so many critics argue such an ISP-controlled web would be the end of a free and independent press, blocking the free flow of information and undermining the very purpose of the world wide web, which American politicians have long touted as one of the greatest means ever conceived of advancing democracy.

The legislative parameters of the issue may be more deep-rooted and more complex than those related to media or the press:

“The normative message is that it is wrong to block the Internet,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who is the chairman of Free Press, an advocacy group that filed the complaint about Comcast for which Mr. Martin is proposing a resolution.

“The deeper message he’s sending here is that users are sovereign. If two people want to send a file between each other, the carriers are not to get in the way.”

Professor Wu said the issues at stake go back to the common-law concept of a common carrier, which defined certain businesses — from blacksmiths to ferries — as so essential to commerce that their owners could not discriminate against any paying customer.

Prof. Wu’s analysis, as reported by The New York Times, means there could be interstate commerce clause concerns tied to any attempt to legislate in favor of ISPs’ blocking access to content. It has also been argued that while these providers appear to believe it is in their interest to assert more aggressive control of users’ activities, perhaps directing users to sites they privilege for profit, the overall result may be the slowing of commerce in general across the nation, and a deterioration of the innovative and communicative value of the Internet as such.

As the web moves toward a period of mounting hyper-convergence, in which everyday services and activities in physical space are integrated into a fabric of personal accounts, information gathering and communication, connectivity must be enabled, not blocked. It is in the fundamental interest of all involved that access be able to be constant, fast, uninterrupted, free and secure against unwanted intrusion.

It may actually be necessary to institute a regulatory policy whereby ISPs cannot “actively observe” the IP addresses being accessed by their users for anything other than statistical analysis, and possibly not even for that purpose, as access and content should not have a single controlling hierarchy.

Some assert that Comcast is showing its flaws, by needing to take action to cover up weaknesses in its overall network capacity, while others argue that the market will push users toward providers whose network infrastructure enables maximum possible access, bandwidth and download speed and quantity.

Relational Data, the Semantic Web & Key Security Priorities

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As the population of users on the world wide web expands at still astonishing rates, and “web 2.0″ —the social networking phenomenon, the integration of real open source innovation, and the free-services standard being pushed by Google— becomes the communicative norm, powerful new realms of innovation could be emerging that will become the third-generation Internet, or web 3.0. We need to understand fully how the interrelation of data and vital security interests can come together to give end-users the richest possible experience.

In October 2001, Tim Berners-Lee —inventor of the world wide web’s foundational protocols— wrote an essay entitled “Business Model for the Semantic Web: Enterprise Application Integration and other stories“, in which he laid out some of the key problems involved in building an Internet that not only facilitates sharing data across distinct networking systems, but which can also “comprehend” and synthesize data for the benefit of the end user. 

Among the problems with executing such an information-blending service we face the following: consistent accurate repetition of data, consistent accurate relational linkage of data, data security, global virtual encryption, re-partitioning of geographical and personal data for the public side of such systems, and global access and control of data for the end user. Add to this the problem of compatibility not only of encryption format but of information layout and tagging, across systems, and we have a labyrinthine task of collaboration which large institutions are still ill-suited to carry out.

The strength, however, of the world wide web is open systems. As ideas and problem-solving solutions compete across a spreading community of researchers and commentators, the are refined, advanced, and innovations emerge which follow a logic not visible from within large, closed institutions with payroll development teams. Harnessing these communities, building their open format into what some web visionaries call “ideagoras”, open markets for ideas primed to produce optimal pace for innovation, will allow us to “fix” the likely gaps in any integrated semantic web system, before it is widely adopted.

According to Berners-Lee, these dispersed web communities are in fact the platform for the semantic web, and their integration and their application to relational data and personal data security are key to the process of standardization needed to enable a dispersed, de-centralized semantic web:

This is done with standards, which is what the World Wide Web Consortium is all about. We are not inventing relational models for data, or query systems or rule-based systems. We are just webizing them. We are just allowing them to work together in a decentralized system – without a human having to custom handcraft every connection.

We will begin to see tagging and labeling of tags, with multiple layers of categorization and author-committed relational presets, all of which will permit pro-active databases, searching for information to aggregate to their contents, to accurately scan and interconnect sites, products and services, based solely on the relative interest expressed by a given site or online operation’s other contents, tie-ins and tags. The semantic web will, at this point of mounting automatic interconnection, require dynamic new security solutions that ensure access to information without exposure to unwanted executable risks.

The semantic web, if properly imagined, will not need to be about “harvesting” information, but simply locating connections. If this is the case, then each individual user should be able to ensure a top level of security for sensitive information, so long as that information is properly identified by the user as sensitive and major online institutions (like banks, universities, government or corporate employers) do not expose sensitive information on their end. 

Da Vinci's Notebooks: Pushing the Limits of Intellectual Pursuit

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The complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, as collected by the Project Gutenberg, are now available through Scribd iPaper, a unique new document format that allows for scrolling through book-length documents right on a static web page, without downloading. The service is a great complement to any project aimed at expanding knowledge, the free flow of information, and access to the great ideas of the past, present, and the future in progress.

We include Leonardo’s extraordinary texts here at HotSpring, as part of the foundations of our Intellectual Property Preserve, through which we seek to help creative individuals establish authorship or the provenance of unique theories, while providing the world with access to revolutionary ideas and creative expression. The commons is reborn with universal digital access to da Vinci’s work, and the long hours put in by the team at Project Gutenberg, to ensure that the most resonant classics remain available in all new media.

We will need to learn to think like Leonardo in order to address the biggest challenges of our age, which will entail reaching far beyond the conceptual limits of prevailing paradigms in science, technology and philosophy, to reach the next frontier, and help create a more intelligent, more resilient, more responsible, fair and open, human civilization.

Ziggurat Century: Global Civilization as the New Babel, with Reason for Hope

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We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers.

Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics. The obvious problem is that some of our most vital human interests come into conflict more readily with those of others, when massive numbers of people mix and intermingle, individuals and cultures competing with one another for the spoils of a new global system.

But there is no reason this has to be a source of friction, suspicion or violence. It is also true that a more open system is more dynamic, more able to adapt to otherwise ‘trivial’ personal interests, and better able to establish truly just rules for negotiating tense competitive situations where decisions need to be made about whose interests are best served by what result. What is needed is devotion to that open system, and real pragmatic tools for helping that system recognize and address genuine situations of friction or crisis.

There are some 6,800 languages spoken in the world today, and more than half are expected to die off within the next 100 years, possibly much sooner, and possibly well over one-half. This rapid evacuation of global language culture —though some will say it brings the benefits of increased uniformity— robs us all of potential bridges across cultures where understanding can take place. As words disappear, so do ideas, comparisons, metaphors, symbols and the human element of perception.

And the degradation of the global culture, in this fashion, while it may be part of a process of integration which will deliver some much needed benefits for long-term peace and human wellbeing, is a stress on the sense of security or identity of those cultures which survive. A key focus at all times, in the new globalized civilization, must be to ensure that identities are not threatened by the mass expansion of media, rights, capital and movement.

The conflict of the Tower of Babel —a place where we presume too many distinct cultures and interests combined, and an empire collapsed— is a conflict of (abstract/thought-pattern) border tensions provoking animosity and rivalry. Actual border conflicts derive fuel and momentum from abstract border conflicts —visions of the world, racial prejudice, linguistic rivalry, competition for resources—, a tendency 21st century technologies, politics and societal developments must counteract.

Openness is part of the new era of information and communication, which has helped to make the world “smaller” or “flatter” or “come together”, if we think more optimistically. As interests and opportunities coincide across nations and cultures, limiting the degree to which geography determines the life choices of a given individual, we face the need to embrace or to fear and oppose the increased openness that offers the resources and the opportunities to meet our interests.

Similar to the way in which cloudscape-computing allows for much more resilient, secure, and super-fast computation, so a broad, integrated global society, if informed by and served by norms that protect the human individual as a creative and information-gathering entity, can achieve new dynamism and vastly more potent and timely means of problem solving, where needed. The new integrated web, the dawn of hyper-convergence, and the global hunger for digital technologies means human society itself is becoming a sort of universal library or information-store.

Technology can help us not only to communicate, but to share the work of solving basic human problems, and to transcend the nature of oppositional conflict. Productive adversarial systems can be woven into a broad social fabric that helps us to debate, confront and work through the challenges of our times without resort to armed confrontation: the ugliest and ultimately least productive of human talents.

The 21st century need not be the new fall of the Tower of Babel, but could be the agile and well-thought construction of an abstract ziggurat —a fortress, a temple, an storehouse of ideas and guidance— shared by the broad continuum of human societies and attuned to our need to communicate and co-create. If we understand the problem of our times is one of forging cooperative bonds that serve the individual and protect human rights, we will be best armed to persevere in the face of challenges to cultural and individual identity, and reap the rewards —as a species— of the information age.

Openness May Be New Gold-standard for Government, Business, Technology

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The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.

What has worked in software development may work as well in business and in government. Historically, industrial development, national security, intelligence gathering, and long-term strategy have been thought to benefit from being kept under lock and key, surrounded by a bank of armed guards and armored exterior walls, both literally and figuratively. But now we are seeing that openness has a tremendous long-term health effect.

So, openness should be considered as a way of mobilizing the voluntary talent of millions of interested and free-thinking individuals, but also as a means of creating a common interest, in defense of which a community of free-thinking, and free-acting individuals self-organize to prevent breakdown. This is, in some ways, an integral part of the revolutionary vision for a democratic society that the United States was founded on, and it is, in the spirit of the early 21st century, a source of promise and renewal in the future of human society.

Markets like openness. Though those who sit atop them often like to see things work specifically and consistently to their own advantage. Consumers like openness. It allows them access to information, which empowers them, and which dignifies their role in the economic fabric. Firms that produce products accompanied by honest information, and/or by a willingness to take responsibility for problems related to their products, tend to build a loyal customer base.

Governments that allow citizen participation tend to find community activism is more productive, less antagonistic, and that the political system itself remains more stable. The more direct involvement people have in the decisions that affect them, the more likely they are to feel they have a role to play, and they will contribute what they can and care about the outcome. This has a positive effect on the efficiency with which a society can adapt to major challenges, on the micro- or the macrocosmic scale.

It is already true that nations with more open media systems and more open forms of government have shown themselves to be more dynamic in social and political terms and more able to adjust to changes in political, social and economic climate, without suffering disintegration or collapse. Open systems are more natural, and more resilient in the face of threats.

“Globalization” is in part based on this phenomenon, in the hopes that opening economic borders will have a dynamic and stabilizing effect, over the long term. A very serious problem, however, with the current state of globalized trade is that it relies heavily on the idiosyncrasies of markets where the political system is corrupt, closed or highly-manipulated, creating great potential for human rights abuse or economic oppression.

The system of forced opening of borders is haunted by its actual lack of openness or citizen-involvement. Development initiatives that consider the real interests of “stakeholders”, local or foreign, are more able to adjust to the real facts of human existence, and therefore are more relevant and more sustainable. That dynamism comes from listening to the voices of those affected, and that involvement is about the openness of a process or a system.

We are likely to see, in coming decades, a far greater reliance on the productive capabilities of such open systems, be they a commons of intellectual property and innovation, a stake-holder-based approach to development, an ecologically-informed approach to economics, or the democratization of nations and regions, in the interests of long-term human wellbeing and sustainability.

  • As part of our Intellectual Property Preserve, this article contains some ideas that are more proposals than reporting. If you would like to collaborate with the author or seek further information for a potential partnership regarding the implementation of some of these ideas, please contact The Hot Spring at: think.media@casavaria.com