The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.

via …My heart’s in Accra » Samuel Bowles introduces Kudunomics.

As did David Weinberger:

Kudu = An antelope of some sort hunted in Tanzania for its massive caloric value. When one is killed, it’s widely shared (perhaps 2/3 outside of the nuclear family). The culture of the foraging band: generosity, modesty about one’s success, sharing. Christopher Boehm (1982) wrote that group sanction is “the most powerful instrument for regulation of individually assertive behaviors.” But mobile foraging bands “and its collectivist and egalitarian norms and properties was eventually displaced by agricultural production.” The critical fact is that that increased land productivity so that a small plot of band was productive enough to live on, which provided an incentive for putting up fences and defending it. These prop rights were not enforced by states but by some form of mutual consent.

In a world now dominated by social networking and wireless communication, most scientific information remains stubbornly locked up in specialized databases, institutional repositories and domain-specific applications. New strategies are needed to free all of this information from the rigid containers, frameworks and work processes in which it is born and increasingly dies. In particular, software engineering must be rethought so that interoperability, openness, and extensibility are designed into data structures. Can data be organized as an active, evolving, open network of heterogeneous concerns and affordances, free of the control of any single software agent or framework? The speaker will describe promising new opportunities making data radically portable and worthy of long-term preservation and access, drawing on several projects in the “semantic grid,” e-science, and digital preservation communities.

via IIC Colloquium – Data Is the Network: Link or Die | Initiative in Innovative Computing IIC.

Most people who speak for a living (as David does, and as I aspire to do) use well-worn and carefully roadtested material. David is brave enough to put new ideas in front of audiences and work through new ideas, live and in public. And we’re lucky enough at the Berkman Center lunch today to hear his new talk, “What Information Was: Bits, Links and the Iron Rule of Irony”, an exploration of issues that David is starting to think about and wrestle with.

via …My heart’s in Accra » David Weinberger: what information was.

This panel discussion explores what it means to offer higher education in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and a knowledge base that is hyperlinked and broadly accessible.

via Events : Harvard Extension School Centennial.

Many of todays youth are embracing a wide array of social media as part of their everyday lives. From social network sites to texting to blogs, many youth are leveraging the power of social media to create, communicate, share, and learn. In this talk, I will examine the various emergent practices, focusing primarily on how American teenagers are navigating the world of social media as a part of everyday life. I will examine inflections in privacy, sociality, and learning. While this talk will focus on those engaged with social media, I will also discuss the costs and challenges of unequal access and the complications that occur when social stratification is reproduced in digital environments.

via Events Calendar | CSAIL.

A Roundtable on Technology and Democracy at Columbia, Nov 24 « collective communications campus.

It’s puzzling that even though we named an age after information, very few people can tell you what information is. And the ones with the clearest answers are often defining information in the technical sense, which is not the sense in which the culture took it up. In this session, we’ll look back at information, trying to understand what about it led us to embrace it as the dominant — paradigmatic — way of understanding ourselves and our world. David Weinberger will present an informal sketch of a direction, suggesting that we leaped into information because it reflected a long-held but squirrely metaphysics. There will be lots of time for open discussion.

[Today] What Information Was | Berkman Center.

Information security continues to grow in importance, as threats proliferate, privacy erodes, and attackers find new sources of value. Yet the security of information systems depends on more than just technology. Good security requires an understanding of the incentives and tradeoffs inherent to the behavior of systems and organizations. As society’s dependence on information technology has deepened, policy makers, including the President of the United States, have taken notice. Now more than ever, careful research is needed to accurately characterize threats and countermeasures, in both the public and private sectors.

via Workshop on the Economics of Information Security 2010.

via MacArthur Foundation Event Invitation.