[bestbits] Is everything bright about the ICT revolution

[michael gurstein]

For a parallel position from a rather non-Pirate source see

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21621800-digital-revolution-bringing-sweeping-change-labour-markets-both-rich-and-poor

M

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From: bestbits-request at lists.bestbits.net [mailto:bestbits-request at lists.bestbits.net] On Behalf Of parminder
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2014 1:35 AM
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Subject: [bestbits] Is everything bright about the ICT revolution

"The authors of the proposal also cite the 2013 Oxford University report ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to computerization?’, where 47% of all jobs in the US are said in danger of extinction at the hands of technological progress. The fields of transport, communication, office work, administration and production are all predicted to be heavily affected. “It is clear,” states the exposition, “that the current social security system will not be able to handle the costs of this immense technological progress.” "

http://grapevine.is/news/2014/10/08/pirates-propose-guaranteed-minimal-income/

Issues that civil society needs to be discussing most. There is a world beyond "Internet freedom", even if we provisionally consider this concept apart from its current capture by the most dominant global economic and political forces .

Has anyone really thought through what the virulent anti-governmentalism of the multi-stakeholderist front does to the future prospects of the poor? (Yes, I know the WEF ists have thought it through, I mean other more innocent followers.) Does it not at some level mean dismantling the welfare state, when it may be needed even more than before, with global corporations escaping all regulation and much of their taxation obligations. Where are these agenda in global IG, and which civil society speaks about them?

Not only we need the global Internet corporations to pay their proper taxes, at places where value accures and not at the places of their incorporation (whether some fancy pacific island or the US), we also need people of the world to be able to appropriate the value that accrues from their information and their data which illegally siphoned value today runs the Internet economy....

parminder