As in all democracies, the right to vote in elections is a fundamental one in the United States Of America as well. However, contrary to other countries with a more centralized approach, the rules for exercising this right in the USA are incredibly complicated, and cumbersome to follow. First of all, you have to be registered to vote. The state does not register you when you become of a voting age, but you have to do it on your own. When you move you residence, you have to register again. If you declared that you vote for a given party, in its primary election, and change your mind, you have to register again. Rules change with each state, and vary depending of the type of election. Etc., etc. It sounds very complicated, and it is.

More than half of the visitors of the English version of this website come from the US, so I am addressing these. Please, register to vote, and please go, and vote for the coming general elections for the President.

Currently about 30%, or almost 60 million people of the total having right to vote are not registered.

All elections matter: they are the way people can concretely demonstrate with democratic tools their positions. But the forthcoming US Presidential elections matter even more in my opinion than others have in the past.

When I was recently in Los Angeles I had the chance to meet and chat with Linda Pollack, an artist and activist, who has an installation called Habeas Index downtown, and who is also active in asking people to register. I went with her in Chinatown to see what happens when people are confronted with the question “Are you registered to vote?”

It was a very interesting experience. From young couples who didn’t seem to care, to old Chinese men who’d smile but didn’t even speak English, or Latinos who appeared to be afraid of the question, there were all kinds of reactions. Linda was able to register several people that afternoon, and she is going to continue her drive up until the deadline of a month before the elections.

Take also a look at David Brin’s arguments for getting people to vote, and getting the ‘ostriches’ raise their head from the sand.

[13:04] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Hey everybody, welcome – we’ll be starting in a few minutes – still lots of people coming in – If this is your first time here, please feel free to grab a gift bag and some treats from the back tables – and welcome to to Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon

[13:06] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Our Salon Spotlight Guest this week is Davidorban Agnon. David is the Founder of OpenSpime, Inc., Vulcano, a community in SL, Lunarez, and numerous other companies and nonprofits, is a blogger, inventor and creative thinker – and David’s going to be talking about his activities, and about The New Renaissance – welcome, David!

[13:08] Davidorban:
Thanks Soph, for the kind intro. Hello everybody! Thanks for having me in front of such an interesting and stimulating audience.

I will speek for about 20-30 minutes and then it will be great to open the floor for discussion and questions and all the fun we can have. But first, I would like to ask some of you some questions.

When I speak in front of a physical audience I always try and establish their ‘breaking point’ in terms of what tools online they do use or even have heard of so let me ask each of you, and just answer with a yes or no.

First question: have you ever contributed to Wikipedia?

[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: no
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Nope
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: yes
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Yes
[13:12] Chimera Cosmos: read only
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: yes
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yeds
[13:12] Extropia DaSilva: No.
[13:12] Galatea Gynoid: minor edits
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: and went to wikimania
[13:12] Tara Yeats: -d
[13:12] Malburns Writer: once or twice
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: I try to aviod acting like I know things…
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes once or twice
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes

[13:12] Davidorban: Second question: do you use Twitter?
[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: no
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: gods yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: addictively
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Yepyep!
[13:12] Yel Oh: hi Alanagh
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yes
[13:12] Dani Revnik: no
[13:12] Kanomi Pikajuna: not any more
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Twitter uses me
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:13] Galatea Gynoid: reluctantly :p
[13:13] Chimera Cosmos: yes, a litle

[13:13] Davidorban:
Third question: would you go as far in lifestreaming as to put (assuming you have any) biological signals online in realtime (for example heartbeats)?
[13:13] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:13] Zentinal Ziskey: nope
[13:13] Velicia Llewellyn: No
[13:14] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: n/a
[13:14] Nikitten Ninetails: no
[13:14] Grace McDunnough has no heartbeat
[13:14] Stan Aichi: sure
[13:14] Yel Oh: if I could think of a good reason to . . yes
[13:14] Extropia DaSilva: Me? No. My primary might but not me.
[13:14] Tara Yeats: unlkiekly
[13:14] Crap Mariner pleads the Fifth
[13:14] Galatea Gynoid: Not sure there’d be a point…
[13:14] Shava Suntzu: unlikely
[13:14] Chimera Cosmos: sure

[13:15] Davidorban:
Fourth question: assuming you could (with an implant or upgrade) merge thoughts, and PURPOSE, with more entities, would you do it?
[13:15] Malburns Writer: Mal hopes to put memories online before heartbeat fades, but …
[13:15] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:15] Centrasian Wise: yep
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Yes
[13:15] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: yes
[13:15] Crap Mariner: No
[13:15] Velicia Llewellyn: …..come again Dave?
[13:15] Yel Oh: yes
[13:15] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Crap: Resistance is futile. :p
[13:15] Shava Suntzu: I want to know more about it before I’d say yes or no
[13:16] Grace McDunnough: Join the merge, Vel . you know you want to
[13:16] Zentinal Ziskey: yes, selectively and voluntarily
[13:16] Velicia Llewellyn: Gotcha

[13:16] Davidorban: So.. thanks for this. It is interesting how when speaking to different audiences you can always lose them after a while with the answers becoming prevalently no, or huh, but not here!
[13:16] Grace McDunnough winks
[13:17] Davidorban: So, let’s start!

And then come back to see what the questions could/should mean, if anything… Let me start with a little dash into history. The ages of humanity have been determined by the evolution of ideas, and their implementations in technology, and societal organization. We have had several epochs, that have been characterized by the interplay between structures and aggregations of various levels: the individual, the family, the clan, the village, the city, the kingdom, the nation state.

Today’s dominant organization, the nation state, is creaking under the forces of globalization. Not only global commerce of products, but also services, and in general the flow of ideas. The metaverse is one of the most important harbingers of the forthcoming changes. And we, in Second Life are experiencing the approaching shockwaves: all the various crackdowns on innovative and controversial practices in SL are a sign of how disquieting, and at the same time how important these experiments are for the physical world.

They are just afraid and rightly so: change is too hard for lazy mammals.

And we are the ones who have to reassure the physical world that change can be beneficial, and while hard, not drammatic, or tragic.

One of my main interests in memetics, and universal Darwinism in general… Dynamic evolution in the metaverse in omnipresent. The evolutionary aspects of Second Life itself are undeniable:
- an environment with constraints hosts
- activities that are observed and copied
- with variation through reinvention
…this is the basic recipe for any universal Darwinian evolution.

I created Vulcano in SL, which you are all welcome not only to visit, but also to be part of, as an evolving social structure. Vulcano on Second Life has been born as an experiment in applying these rules within a social structure. What happens if you let everybody do what they most want to do and learn in SL, to build whatever they want?

The only ‘seed’ as the starting point of the evolution being “apply common sense”!

Since everybody’s definition of common sense is different, there will be a lot of variation, as the news of Vulcano is passed around and people here “Hey you can do anything on Vulcano, as long as it makes sense”. And given the maximum number of prims on a land, there is an environmental constraint that is applied, eliminating what are the stupid ideas, and keeping the ones that in this context make most sense.

After more than a year of evolution on Vulcano we are ready to start and abstract some of the things we learned!

Lesson one: stakes must not always be raised!
We have had thermonuclear attacks, which we survived, and decided not to ban the attacker. The biological necessity of always trumping the enemy so that you won’t be exterminated doesn’t apply!

Lesson two: you can encourage mistakes!
The wonderful sensation of being free to experiment (the childlike wonder, as FSJ would say) is here to stay even as adults when you realize that other people are making the same at the same time as you are or that they went through the same experiences as you are.

Lesson three: metarules are fundamentally important!
In order not to burden the growing community with more and more rules, we have metarules that establish the survival value of the social structures, and the rules that sustain them.

Our next excersise running right now is going to be the design of a dynamic constitution that will have an XML formulation in order to be machine readable, and allow the evaluation of DIFFERENCES between different forumlations. Why is this very important in our opinion? When different online worlds in the metaverse interoperate the frontier crossing them will beeven more important than those between countries today as the changes will impact the laws not only of the social structure, but ownership, DRM, control, identity. When you are crossing in an Open Source world, you shall leave all your nice DRM protected dresses behind!

(BTW: as a consequence, since this filter is not symmetrical, Open Source creation is bound to overcome greatly close sourced creation in the metaverse as well)

So, to start the final part of my speech…
When ideas flow freely, since they are not a scarce resource, what you must keep is adding value through further elements of invention, and creativity.

What happens to humanity as we merge with machines?
What will become of natural humans in a world of automation, where white collar jobs are as regularly mechanised, as blue collar ones in the ’70s or the ’80s?

Too many people are living in a state of fear. Because they confuse evolution with extermination. Still today the most numerous life forms on the planet are bacteria.

Humans are the foundation of the technological evolution, which is going to acquire a large degree of autonomous life. When humans decoupled themselves from the grind of the natural environment 10000 years ago with the invention of agriculture, they took on the new grind of organizing their new life as mechanizers. After 10000 years of trying we are now on the verge of actually being able and go back to what we are good at: chatting, grooming, telling stories, etc.

Without the heartbreaking realities of a 20 year long average lifespan and without the incredible loss of ideas being born just to be extinguished becaue of lack of connectedness.

This is what I call the New Renaissance!

Going back, by going forward: embracing technological tools, to achieve fulfilling and stimulating lives where creativity is unbounded by commercial rules and flows openly adding to humanity’s happiness in an inclusive society that is not afraid of the future that it is building

[13:41] Davidorban: THE END

Please read the full Q/A session on Scribd

Here is the video of our conversation:

Barack Obama is a choice for a desirable future.

It also helps that, according to the Washington Post’s political compass survey, my views are strongly aligned with his.

The planet is intertwined, connected, unavoidably influencing its different parts with political and economical decisions, which today are not in turn influenced but by those who happen to live within what are called ‘national borders’. We have no mechanism in place to make sure that in a rightly nuanced and well defined manner the needs of those who are not within those borders are also taken into consideration. In the future we will need these tools, and we might then see elections that happen on a global scale, even without a worldwide government. Many of us would have wished to be able and vote in the US elections in the past two rounds, at least. And there a millions of people whose lives have been strongly impacted by their outcome. If it were possible, I’d vote for Barack, in the name of change.

Tomorrow is the day in the primary elections in the US when it’ll be seen if Obama or Clinton is going to become the Democratic candidate in the general elections… that is why I am writing this today.

The printed edition of the ‘Corriere della Sera‘ has an article today about the unintended side effects of the site filtering system that Vodafone put in place recently to supposedly protect minors from adult materials while browsing the web using the Vodafone Live! application suite.

As reported in Italian by Stefano, the author of Quinta’s Blog, among Italy’s most read, the censorware used by Vodafone is also impeding the access to the websites of several political parties. It is often, if not always, the case, that the dumb filters are unable to do their ill-defined jobs, and at the same time stop people using the internet in an unfettered manner to communicate.

The Italian Government has just fallen a few days ago, and the level of discussion, both among politicians, and with the voters, is intense. This is not the time to artificially restrict what people can say on a medium, like mobile phones, which in Italy is actually much more widespread than PCs!

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

There are also some videos that I shot, photos

Your comments are welcome here, or on the discussion group we created!

The UN has started the final procedures to put to a vote in front of the General Assembly a resolution for a universal moratorium on the death penalty. While not binding, the adoption of a resolution like this would be a further step towards an understanding how civilization ought to evolve in a complex environment that ill tolerates aggression at any level and from any source. And we should better want to be part of the solution then part of the problem ourselves.

A wonderful video at TED by Steven Pinker, ‘A History Of Violence’, illustrates how fallible we are in our evaluations on how the use violence changed in our societies at all scales. Its dramatic decline is illustrated in Pinker’s talk, and should serve as a guideline to politicians as strong as Moore’s law is to engineers as they stumble towards our shared future.

Then there is Sens, which takes further steps, and boldly declares that the invention of death, attributed to that of sexual reproduction a few billion years ago, is also a mistake, which we must correct.

Follow the link to the Metasocial Web video on YouTube if you don’t see the embedded video…

Well, that was fast. I thought of the Metasocial Web a few days ago, and looks like I will be delivering a speech about it at Web2.0 Ignite in Berlin tomorrow.

A lot of what the Metasocial Web should be is in flux, naturally, so it will be good to get the feedback from the audience, and compare notes on how to quickly progress towards it. The core of the argument is that we are ready to pull together information from public data repositories, and use crowdsourced effort to manage the data to get a better dynamic understanding on how our political, social, and economic systems interact. The goal is to be able and build as much second order knowledge about these systems as possible, in order to operate them at a higher level of efficiency then possible before.

I am calling this the Metasocial Web, or Societal Software, as social networks concern themselves with individuals, and their groupings, while the Metasocial Web is concerned about societies, and their possible competitive comparisons. My idea is that countries that adopt a Metasocial Web are going to be much more effective in allocating their tax resources, and that given this competitive advantage, all countries are going to be pushed towards it quickly.

The rule of law is at the basis of human societies. What kind of rule, law, and society, is of course the important detail that defines the opportunities for a healthy, wealthy, and happy community which can express the full potential of its members. The new medium of those online worlds can become a platform, when their original creators have left openings for the participants to implement their own views, creativity, and objectives in its day-to-day life. This is the case with Second Life, and its residents have been quick recognizing how wide a range of social groups could be formed in it, from anarchies to dictatorships. There are some crude tools in the Second Life client, that enable a rough management of groups and private islands, banning for example griefers from an island, but these are no substitute for a nuanced, complete, and most importantly, enforceable legal system.

The Metaverse Republic initiative, itself formed by those involved with the Local Government Study Group, aims to form a judiciary and legal system for Second Life, based on English common law principles, and on the separation of powers. The Metaverse Replublic launched its website yesterday, and Antonio Bonanno, aka Mondrian Lykin has been interviewed in a podcast on Metaversed detailing the goals of the initiative.

As it has been commented by Riccardo , aka Bru Yang, at a previous meeting of LGSG on Vulcano in Second Life, and also by Folletto in a conversation we had recently, maybe we should aim for more than what appears here. Recreating online all the existing structures of the legal system of a the society in a physical world might make us blind to more degrees of freedom, to a parametric implementation that gives birth to a richer emergent structure potentially. For example: Tripartite powers? Who said so? Or: What about the rights of non-human autonomous agents?

These days I have less time to actively participate in the discussions that are shaping Metaverse Roadmap, even if I am keeping an eye on what is going on. I have spoken about politics in the online worlds in the past at Care-Craedo, and at Frontiers of Interaction, and will be doing so at SLconference 07 in Berlin.

My interest is in measuring the rate of efficiency in the workings of online worlds, and to observe as this rate hopefully increases as evolutionary means enable it to do so. Crossing a threshold of usefulness then lets us take what we build and apply it to the physical world. We sure need it…