To cultivate the cultural aspects of my personality, I sometimes read the news including the arts criticism. Today I have stumbled upon the concept of cyberpessimism, which apparently insinuates pessimism about what the internet actually can do for democracy (or not, as it were). The article mostly reminds me of a passage from Code V2 by Lawrence Lessig: they who control the code control the content, keeping in mind the example of limits of participants in chatrooms imposed by AOL sometime way back in the 1990s.

It's certainly possible to write a book about the topic, but suffice to say a link sent to me in a startled e-mail yestereve, with a Council conclusion on the need to strengthen human rights from last year, fits perfectly on the topic of the essay, while of course both the cyberpessimism thinkers and the Council seem to miss unmotivated internet filtering and blocking in Europe. In Europe, we accomplish this by voluntary private-private partnerships a lot of the time (see for instance the wikipedia page on Internet censorship) or private-semi-public partnerships (I invented these terms, because public-private partnerships is a buzzword on international level).

A friend of mine says "Don't read the news, be the news." It does take a lot of time to read news, and most of the information you gather is simply not very valuable.

More valuable then, is the work I accomplished (on some level), yesterday with a summary of the Internet of Things dossier for the Green group. Work will continue today with post-i2010, innovation strategies and internet governance. This means I need to get a better grasp of the Framework program 7 criticism. The way I currently understand it is: FP5 was very open to open research projects, but throughout FP6 and FP7 there's been an increasing inclination to support projects that end up in private property. The Framework programs have also consistently neglected supporting research into social impacts of new technologies and/or evaluations of citizen (or consumer) change of behaviour when confronted with new technologies.

Apart from that, mapping the Competition and Innovation Program (currently under-going) will be useful. I keep coming back to a report from last year about small and medium sized enterprises and their competetive/innovative behaviour. More studies like that would be good.

On a side-note: Google donates lots to Wikipedia, thereby not at all avoiding the impending battles with Iran or China.

There has been talk about my financial situation, and in particular the difficulties with resolving the same. I'm very fortunate, because I have a lot of good friends who are very supportive not only politically but also financially. I would like to extend sincere gratitude to everyone who's offered to give(!) me money so that I can hope to do something useful here. Further, a couple of people have granted me quite large loans, taken from their private savings. Because I am currently leeching a place to live, and often get treated to dinners by friendly people in my environment, I don't have to spend too much money.

It appears that the situation will remedy itself now: the Green group has kindly offered to look into the possibilities of providing me some cash from the research budget to research present internet issues (see above) for them. For the part that that money wouldn't cover, I still have the possibility of lending money from some private individuals I know.

In the event that someone would like to provide general support for the work in Brussels, rather than specifically for me, I believe we need short-term funding for server maintenance in Sweden and a spread of competence on global and EU issues in the party that may best be accomplished by a shared fund for covering travelling expenses. Terobi is probably the person to tell you about global ip health right now. She will also advocate the importance of keeping up with those debates :)

Back to my feeds.