madisen

The open movement, with its focus on access and public interest, has an important role in the ongoing rethinking of online privacy and the recognition of new challenges of datafication and governing online data, which cannot be solved by relying on the current data protection regime.

MANIFESTO

After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the conclusion that in e-commerce we do not sell clothes... we sell images of clothes. Compressed, digital versions of physical products. As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, a product image is a symbol or metaphor of a product. Media--in this case images--mediates... See more

I really kind of like the American project. The experiment of, “Hey, let’s go try out a bunch of different things and allow people to build things that they would like to have built.” Why don’t we enable and empower more people in that way? Fortunately the technologies can work that way, but we need people to think ethically. As Larry Lessig put... See more

These enormous players have absolute roles and responsibilities in how things work. The medium is the message. We are living in Marshall McLuhan land where the medium forms how we think about things. The way the web is coded determines a lot of how we live our lives online. It’s now not just the web, it’s how Facebook is coded, how Google is coded.

“The more information is free, the more opportunities for it to be collected, refined, packaged and made expensive,” said Stewart Brand, the technology visionary who first developed the formulation. “The more it is expensive, the more workarounds to make it free. It’s a paradox. Each side makes the other true.”

The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.

they view the encyclopedia as a “consensus truth,” as one of them put it: It acts as a reality check in a society where facts are increasingly contested. That truth is less about data points — “How old is Joe Biden?” — than about complex events like the Covid-19 pandemic, in which facts are constantly evolving, frequently distorted and furiously... See more

warriors

Wikimedia’s contribution to a free and healthy Internet is not limited to its knowledge output — it also counts as a civic, democratic space.