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From Kevin Kelly:
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all
"""
We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government -- for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.
"""

In some ways, the capitalistically-oriented Bayh-Dole act is another thing that has damaged scientific integrity.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh-Dole_Act

A better idea than Bayh-Dole, which gives ownership of inventions to universities and the government, would be for all inventions funded in whole or in part by public or charitable dollars should go under free licenses (or into the public domain). Something I wrote on that:
  http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html

Like nuclear technology, or biotech, or other advanced technologies which all function as amplifiers for the human mind, robotics have the potential to make the world work well for most everyone. But it requires using them in a post-scarcity way, fostering abundance for all through cooperation. Instead, often people think of these technologies from a mindset of scarcity, and so use them to competitive way to defend a hoard of privilege.

Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

More on this theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

Something I wrote on that topic last year:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? ... We are witnessing a historic end to scarcity of many things (maybe not all, but enough to be a new global Renaissance). But is Princeton University helping prepare either students or the rest of society for these changes? Or is it instead an institution under stress, crashing into these trends instead of moving with them? Or is it perhaps conflicted in how it sees itself and its future, and so trying to do both these conflicting approaches at once? :-) Capitalism is often it seems all about cost cutting. Why do people have such a hard time thinking about what happens as costs approach zero, even for improvements in quality? Or why do economists have a hard time understanding that many conventional economic equations may produce infinities as costs trend towards zero? "

Charles-

You're so right. :-)

Here are links to some related things I've written, to maybe give you some more inspiration. :-)

This posting asks, if copyrights are so valuable, why is there not an annual tax on them for the burden they impose on society?
    http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html

This long essay talks about the deeper social issue is the transition to a "post-scarcity" society.
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
(Sorry, I did not go to Harvard, but I do mention it there in passing. :-)

This is a satire about what the practice of law would be like if the law was set up the way most lawyers advise the rest of the world to live: :-)
    "Microslaw"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

Albert Einstein said: "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it".

We need to move beyond a lottery model for supporting creativity.

Keep trying. History will ultimately be on your side.

--Paul Fernhout

Charles-

You're so right. :-)

Here are links to some related things I've written, to maybe give you some more inspiration. :-)

This posting asks, if copyrights are so valuable, why is there not an annual tax on them for the burden they impose on society?
    http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/biplog/archive/000431.html

This long essay talks about the deeper social issue is the transition to a "post-scarcity" society.
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
(Sorry, I did not go to Harvard, but I do mention it there in passing. :-)

This is a satire about what the practice of law would be like if the law was set up the way most lawyers advise the rest of the world to live: :-)
    "Microslaw"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html

Albert Einstein said: "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it".

We need to move beyond a lottery model for supporting creativity.

Keep trying. History will ultimately be on your side.

--Paul Fernhout

Essentially, the Singularity is a mirror. It is in some ways just a mirror of our own choice of virtues or lack thereof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues

LIke Harry Potter looking into the mirror or Erised, Ray Kurzweil looks into that mirror of the Singularity and sees himself: a very logically intelligent business person interested in accelerating technology by promoting artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights. Thus, he pushes for a singularity filled with competition and artificial scarcity, rather than one filled with cooperation and abundance for all. What's the danger in that? While we may not know enough yet to make a friendly AI with humane values, we certainly know enough to make some nasty dumb replicators and military robotics programmed to kill widely, plus we already have nuclear and bio weapons. As I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me?"

Kurzweil also doesn't understand ecology and evolution very well, in terms of making assumptions about the value of intelligence without seeing how it plays an adaptive role in only certain ecological niches.

More comments on those themes as emails I've sent to Ray Kurzweil, archived by someone else here:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

What does this chart suggest about a law of diminishing returns for being more intelligent? :-)
http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm

Look at the ratios, and see the Fin whale ratio of brain to bodymass. It's tiny.

Bigger may be better up to a point, but it looks like a law of diminishing returns sets in.

One might posit some sort of inverse square law for the usefulness of increasing amounts of computational capacity to an organism, given perhaps exponentially increasing difficulty in creating more detailed or longer-term predictions of the world. This is an issue weather forecasters may wrestle with, in terms of facing chaotic behavior impacting predictability in weather systems. It's called "the Butterfly effect" where a small mistake or mismeasure may have increasingly big implications over time. So there is a need for constant remeasuring and recalibration of the models, which reduces the value of predictions and related computations. This is kind of like a game of chess where pieces were moved randomly by outside forces every once in a while, reducing the value in looking ahead too much.

Obviously, architecture can play a part in changes in intelligence too. But even Jupiter Brains might get dementia or turn uncommunicative.

Anyway, so this ratio of brain sizes and body mass may suggest the same thing. It's not that bigger is not better in some sense, it is just that it it only justifiable energetically up to a point.

Consider that a Right whale's testes may weigh over a two thousand pounds compared to that whale's fifteen pound or so brain, or about 100X bigger, whereas for humans the ratio is approximately reversed, the brain 100X larger. (Fin whales' testes are closer to 100 pounds, or 7X brain size, but still much larger than their brains.) So, you can see what nature is betting on when body size goes up. :-)

It's not like whale's could not easily have brains that were 10X bigger. Whales are social, and even communicate around the p

My comments almost three years ago on the Shuttleworth foundation also trying to reform schools, and applicable here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397

Also, a related essay I wrote:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools.
Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving
compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the
information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch
this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory
schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."

Gates' initiatives for small schools are probably just more of the same, to make digital slave laborers. Even the more radical reform in the news still puts the emphasis is still on making kids fit into the needs of business:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html

At least Shuttleworth's initiatives are trying to empower kids, but that group too can't get past seeing schooling as the solution, instead of realizing it is a big part of the problem disempowering the next generation.

In twenty to thirty years computers will be about another million times faster, and we'll have better 3D printers and smarter dexterous seeing robots, and most humans just won't be employable in any sense we now understand. A previous related post by me to Slashdot on computing and education and the mindset of the class of 2029:
"Ignores the big picture on exponential computing
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279703&cid=20354965

Marshall Brain on that theme:
"Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

A bigger generalization on that theme by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year, in general on this:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this intellectual proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient
-- Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History

Two Social Revolutions Become One

Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?

As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom y

Here is a somewhat sarcastic essay on the Ivy League which relates indirectly to Andrew Lahde's comments:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html

It talks about moving beyond conventional economics altogether to a Linux-like post-scarcity paradigm, and what it would mean to re-envision an elite institution along those lines.

From the introduction: "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? "

Here is a satire about what our society would look like if the law was like what lawyers recommend for everyone else:
    "Microslaw"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"""
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.

There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.

First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.

MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.

In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience applause]. ...
"""

The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.

It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
    http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."

People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.

Another related essay:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."

The OLPC project has multiple issues. That "security" choice is one of them, as in the Sugar GUI (as
opposed to plain Gnome desktop). Having said that, the rest of the article is FUD.
These cheap laptops are revolutionizing the possibilities for planet-wide democracy and education.

It is true children do better with adult involvement. But kids learn by themselves as well
when adults can't be present. The "Hole in the Wall" project by Sugata Mitra project shows that:
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm

And work by John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others call into question the political underpinnings
of the entire enterprise of compulsory education:
    http://www.holtgws.com/johnholtpage.html
    http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
    http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
    http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651

Here is an essay I wrote on "The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era":
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-true-cost-of-Princeton.html
"This essay suggests that the cost of just one year of elite college education across the top fifty elite schools costs about the same order of magnitude as what it would cost to educate the poorest billion children on the planet K-12 using networked laptops. And that's just one example of the upcoming transition to a "post-scarcity" society we are in the middle of right now as a planet."

People can decry specific problems which have fixes, but the bottom line is that we can now
educate billions of poor kids on the planet for a fraction of the Iraq war and are not yet doing so.

Another related essay:
    "Post-Scarcity Princeton"
    http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"And those trends continue to the point where, say, for *only* US$600 billion (plus some more for communications infrastructure in some places) everyone on the planet can have a personal laptop with access to all these services and others, including free-to-the-user voice communications. US$600 billion is about a fifth of the current projected total cost of the Iraq war. And if a family shares one laptop, this might only cost about $200 billion, or about the size to a recent mailing of "rebate" checks to US Americans intended to prevent recession. And the potential benefits of a connected planet to help everyone become prosperous together in a diverse and democratic way is enormous. Even just one breakthrough innovation, like, say, a general cure for cancer, developed by, say, a woman in Africa studying pond water who might otherwise not have received an education, might pay back that $200 billion investment a hundred fold. And, if $200 billion still sounds too expensive right now for a chance at world peace and prosperity, in another ten years, it might only cost US$20 billion ($10/laptop) to give every family such a laptop. And in ten years after that, US$2 billion ($1/laptop, same as some electronic greeting cards now integrating paper, printing, and circuitry). Or, essentially, at that point twenty years from now, the laptops are free, compared to the benefits and other cost savings (like not needing to mail paper as often)."