— Rachel Monroe at The Awl. The Killer Crush: The Horror Of Teen Girls, From Columbiners To Beliebers
Rising Voices is saddened to hear about the death of Dennis Kimambo, who was an integral part of the RV grantee project REPACTED in Nakuru, Kenya. Close friend and colleague Janet Feldman writes this tribute to the life and work of Dennis and how he impacted his local community through magnet theater and outreach to youth.
This news dropped on me like a ton of bricks.
Online we’ve all got many weak ties and I was weakly tied to Dennis Kimambo. There are weak ties that are weak because they are brief. But online nowadays there are people we connect with over lengths of time. That’s the way it was with Dennis. I remember a history and the cutting short of his life feels so significant.
I noticed on Facebook that I’ve got 50 mutual friends with Dennis. That kind of sorting is interesting. My connections mostly stem from an online social network called Omidyar Network which is long gone. But one group of Facebook friends Dennis and I share is bunch of kids in Uganda who make change in their community.
The grassroots work of Dennis Kimambo made a real difference, but of the sort that’s hard to imagine: What might have been without him. So the really important thing is his imagination of what might be if people come to understand each other. What we might become if we could resolve conflicts without violence.
I am sad about my friend Dennis Kimambo’s death. My thoughts turn to my many weak ties online. There’s an accounting of sorts where I realize how some of those ties are very important to me. I’m not sure that what to do is to try to strengthen those ties or even how to do that. But I do have a desire to thicken the ties, to pay more attention to them. I believe it does make a difference when people outside local communities notice and engage with others making positive change inside their communities.
Rest in peace Dennis Kimambo. You are not forgotten.
— Michel Bauwens at Re-Public. Michel Bauwens – The social web and its social contracts: Some notes on social antagonism in netarchical capitalism
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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in The National. Book review: Evgeny Morozov’s compelling book on the power, the freedom and the dangers of the internet
— Geert Lovink at Open Democracy. Evgeny Morozov attacks internet consensus single-handed
I’m a long-time reader of Ethan Zuckerman’s blog My Heart’s in Accra. In a recent post he points to a a piece in Foreign Policy by David Rieff and to his reply there. My heart sank as I read the title of Rieff’s essay: “The Singularity of Fools.”
Had I not gotten to the article the way I did, I think I might have posted a link and this snippet from Rieff’s essay:
[W]hen a belief that some Internet-based deus ex machina will come along to fix the most intractable of humanity’s problems becomes the consensus view, and that the most profound moral and political challenges that confront humanity in the 21st century are in fact not moral or political at all, but rather largely technical, then there is ample cause for alarm.
Here’s a snippet from Zuckerman’s reply titled “Who’s Afraid of Cyberoptimism” :
We can acknowledge that many promises for technology are overblown and that technology alone is unlikely to bring an end to disease, ignorance, and poverty. We can recognize that these visions of technology are influenced by ideas about politics and economics that often go unconsidered. And we can use these reflections not to belittle those who build tools and those who celebrate them, but to develop new tools that better address inequities and imbalances.
— Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart’s in Accra. Schneier and Zittrain on digital security and the power of metaphors
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Evgeny Morozov at The Baffler. The Meme Hustler
Tim O’Reilly’s crazy talk
An old Wired profile of O’Reillyby Steven Levy provides a bit more positive portrait. I think the skepticism Morozov brings to his pieces about the Internet is helpful and necessary. But there’s a history here bigger than Tim O’Reilly which seems to me to require multiple perspectives for a clear picture.
— Bruce Schneier at CNN. The Internet is a surveillance state
— An Xiao at Hyperallergic. The Social Ties That Unbind
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